Learning by doing

I do not believe that I have covered this before, but the Active Record Code Generator can also generate audit records for your database tables. The template that I wrote ( SqlAuditTrigger.vm ) adds records to an AuditChanges table, with a related AuditFields table containing the table and field name. I think that this is a fairly compact solution, but I also added code to the trigger to ignore SA (system administrator) changes. This may not be appropriate for your application, but it is easily removed. I also have a "TODO" item to detect related lookup tables (really ENUMs) and translate IDs to Names, so that changes to the FavoriteColor_ID field would look at the FavoriteColor table, and instead of recording FavoriteColor_ID changed from 2 to 5, it would say changed from "Ruby Red" to "Passionate Purple". The reason that I did not actually implement it is that I do not have enough information. My code generation schema does not list all of the f...

Friday, I added an NHibernate mapping.hbm.xml template. I mainly wanted to show that the code generator can be used for other purposes than just Castle ActiveRecord, and NHibernate is an easy target. Jim R. has requested that I add HasMany (aka ManyToOne) mapping properties and attributes. I think this is going to push me to refactor the schema extraction code. Some of my future goals for the application are: 1. Full Model Generation (list of children, whether directly or indirectly through a many-to-many table) 2. User controllable plural-to-singular mapping. 3. Multi-database, using the Database Provider Factory. 4. Refactor code generation into a library (as I do with all projects) 5. Command-line code generation (supply at least a template and a list of tables) 6. Templates for other ORM tools (pure NHibernate, Rocky Lhotka's CSLA Business Objects, etc.)

I have improved the Inequality test in the model template, as requested by JimR . This was another case where it worked well for me, only because I followed the convention that primary keys are named ID, and foreign keys are named SingularOfTable_ID. I know that I should really push the Inequality test into the template, but for now, I have corrected it in the DbFieldInfo class.

Thanks to some recent interest in the community, I have made a few more changes to ActiveRecord Code Generator . First, I added a browse button and a dialog, using some code supplied by Jim R . I don't care for the folder browser dialog, but it is built in to .Net 2, so I use it. Second, I fixed a few bugs that crop up when a table does not match my arbitrary table and field naming scheme. This project was written quickly as a pre-requisite to a large project, and it shows, but it is steadily improving. Evening Update: I added a POCO (Plain Old C# Object) template as a starting point for an NHibernate cs and xbm template set.

Today, I updated the ActiveRecord Code Generator a bit. I checked in changes to use primary and foreign key details from INFORMATION_SCHEMA. The original code used naming conventions to decide what various fields were used for - ID = Primary Key, Field_ID = Foreign Key to table Fields. If you want to use naming conventions, let me know and I can add a setting in App.Config to allow this (along with any "real" key constraints).