LINQ to SQL Associations and seperated projects

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Hi there,

I have been playing around with LINQ2SQL for a bit now and started wondering about the Associations that one would make between two entity classes.

Let's say I have Table A and B in a SQL Database. There exits a 1-M relationship between A and B. The entity classes that represent Tables A and B are found in 2 different Projects (let us call the Project A (has entity class A) and Project B (has entity class B) in VS2010. B depends on A to do some work, but for obvious reasons, only B should have a reference to A.

When implementing the LINQ Associations, B must have EntityRef<A> and A [must(?)] have EntitySet<B>. But this will cause a circular dependancy!!! So would the correct thing to do be not to reference B from A at all? Is it really that necessary to have an EntitySet<B> in A?

Posted 6-Oct-11 21:19pm

PJ du Preez

Updated 6-Oct-11 21:21pm

v2

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Solution 1

I,ve never used LinQ2SQL, but when I create my own classes I never have an EntitySet<B>. For example, if I have a Customer object, and each Customer is associated with several Order objects, I have a OrderCustomer property in my Order class, but I never have a List<Orders> in my Customer class.

Posted 6-Oct-11 21:56pm

Wayne Gaylard

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PJ du Preez 7-Oct-11 4:00am

Yes, my initial model did use List<t>. but with LINQ2SQL you use the entityset\ref as to accommodate the associations mapped by LINQ

Wayne Gaylard 7-Oct-11 4:06am

Yeah, that was just used as an example. These days I use WPF and so use ObservableCollection for storing collections. I still think generating classes by hand, while tedious, is still better in the end. Especially when you need to start doing things that start getting complicated.

PJ du Preez 7-Oct-11 4:18am

That's pretty cool, we're using LINQ as an ORM\DAL. The generated code sucks eggs so it's all manually typed.

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PJ du Preez · Accepted Answer · 2012-01-18T20:42:00

Solution 2

Ok so I kinda solved it myself:

to quote myself from my question: 'When implementing the LINQ Associations, B must have EntityRef and A [must(?)] have EntitySet.'

It is not required for A to have EntitySet. so I merely dropped EntitySet from A. No circular dependancy!!!

Posted 18-Jan-12 20:42pm

PJ du Preez