I have been given the source code for an existing project that uses SubSonic ORM. My (limited!) understanding is that SubSonic generates code by reverse-engineering the existing database. Unfortunately I don't have the database that was used for this project.
I do have the ActiveRecord.cs file from the last time it was compiled. How could I work out the database schema so I can reproduce the database?
This sounds like SubSonic 3. Here are a couple places to get you started based on me looking through my ActiveRecord.cs file. You might want to create a small database yourself, run SubSonic on it, and see what gets generated in ActiveRecord.cs.
Inside your ActiveRecord.cs file, you'll find one partial class per table. The partial class will inherit from IActiveRecord and will likely be the name of the table.
Inside the class, you'll find a function called "KeyName()" which will return your primary key column name for the table. SubSonic requires a primary key for tables it processes and generates code for.
Look for a region named " Foreign Keys ". If this table has foreign keys, you'll find a property corresponding to each foreign key, something like "public IQueryable OtherTableNames". So this table should have a column named something like "OtherTableNameID"; check the generated partial class for the foreign key table to be sure.
Immediately below the foreign key region, you'll find properties for the non-foreign key columns of this table. You can somewhat guess at the data types of the columns from the property data types (e.g. string might be a char(x) or a varchar(x)).