data-access-layer

Is there a difference between the DAO pattern and the Data Mapper pattern? Is DAO just one of doing Data Mapper? I wouldn't actually call DAO a "pattern". As I see it, DAO is pretty much what it is -- a Data Access Object", which encapsulates the details of accessing a persistent data store and generally speaking has nothing to do with the database: interface IBlogDaoService { Blog GetBlog(long id); void SaveBlog(Blog blog); } It's clear that implementations can use either DB (in which case it's quite logical to use a Data Mapper), or simple XML file storage mechanism. The Data Mapper on the

I'm using Dapper (thanks Sam , great project.) a micro ORM with a DAL and by some reason I'm not able to execute stored procedures with input parameters. In a example service I've the following code: public void GetSomething(int somethingId) { IRepository<Something, SomethingEnum> repository = UnitOfWork.GetRepository<Something, SomethingEnum>(); var param = new DynamicParameters(); param.Add("@somethingId", dbType: DbType.Int32, value:somethingId, direction: ParameterDirection.Input); var result = repository.Exec<Something>(SomethingEnum.spMyStoredProcedure, param); ... } When the execution

Earlier I asked this question How to correctly unit test my DAL? , one thing left unanswered for me is if to really test my DAL is to have a Test DB, then what is the role of mocking vs. a testing DB? To add on this, another person suggested to "use transactions and rollback at the end of the unit test, so the db is clean", test db that is. What do you guys think of this testing + test DB + transaction rollback (so db is not really written) approach to test DAL? To be complete, my DAL is built with Entity Framework, there is no stored proc in DB. Since EF is so new, I really need to test DAL

I'm using .NET 4.0, MVC3, and EF5 with code first. My solution is split up into three projects, with the dependencies as indicated: Project.Web -> Project.BLL -> Project.DAL The Project.DAL layer contains my entity framework data context class and all my entities, but my startup project is Project.Web, so it contains my Web.config, connection strings, and the actual SQL compact database. I'm trying to enable migrations so I can add a new table to my EF model without wiping the existing data. However, when I run "Enable-Migrations", I get No context type was found in the assembly 'Project.Web'.

Let's say we have four entities in data model: Categories, Books, Authors and BookPages. Also assume Categories-Books, Books-Authors and Books-BookPages relationships are one-to-many. If a category entity instance is retrieved from database - including "Books", "Books.BookPages" and "Books.Authors" - this will become a serious performance issue. Moreover, not including them will result in "Object reference is not set to an instance of an object" exception. What is the best practice for using multiple Include method calls? Write a single method GetCategoryById and include all items inside