How do you access data from your I Series in ASP.Net?

Question

All of our current ASP.Net web apps access our IBM I Series using an ODBC connection and command object. Should I move to another way of accessing it? How do you current access your I Series when your ASP.Net app needs data from it? There has to be a better way.

I recently saw this article about IBM supporting Linq to Entities with a specific client version on the web server. To me, that seems like the more long term route to go but would like more feedback. I get the vibe from MS that Linq to Entities is the long term route they plan to go. Is that the feeling others are getting too?

Answer 1

I am using the drivers supplied by IBM. The beauty of this is that we can use a single DataAccess object built on the enterprise library application blocks and not create a bunch of custom code for the iSeries connections.

Provider=IBMDA400.DataSource.1

Answer 2

Why does there "need to be a better way"? What's the problem with the way you're using that you're trying to avoid? Are you, perhaps, using SQL directly in your web pages? Are you missing a data-access-layer, or object-relation-mapper? Seems to me a well designed system with a nice business object layer wouldn't really care about the actual connection to the 400.

Answer 3

I have used the IBM managed provider to access ISeries and that has been working out just great.

IBM have some RedBook resources on it here.

In the applications I've written so far towards ISeries it hasn't been justified to use any ORM, but if the need would arise I would definately go for NHibernate.