Tools - Part 4 - Add-ins - Adding functionality to the Entity Framework EDMX designer
After playing around a bit with the ADO.NET Entity Framework designer in Visual Studio 2008 SP1 I was a bit disappointed with its’ user friendliness (or lack thereof). I guess this can be read between the lines in my previous entry on EF.
Instead of waiting for the next service pack for Visual Studio I figured it is more constructive to try to work around the shortcomings in Visual Studio by adding the missing functionality. So I started adding some edmx-related functionality to the Huagati DBML Tools add-in package. That immediately makes the original choice of name for the add-in a bad one, so I guess from now on it will be “Huagati DBML and EDMX tools”… 
EDMX Addin #1: Renaming entity sets, entity types, properties, and navigation properties in EDMX (ADO.NET Entity Data Model) files
The first function, released today, is a renaming function that goes through all entity sets, entity types (classes), properties, and navigation properties in a EDMX file (EF designer) and renames them according to a user-selectable set of rules.
This is more or less similar too the dbml naming convention add-in but this one works with the Entity Framework designer instead of the Linq-to-SQL designer. It updates the conceptual and mapping side and also comes with a new shiny options dialog allowing users to specify what naming rules to apply. The options dialog also has a “preview” field for each section at the bottom of the screen that shows what the outcome will be on classes/properties in the currently open edmx file if using the selected settings.
Please allow me a screenshot-by-screenshot demonstration/walk-through:
1) Right after using the edmx import wizard, the conceptual layer objects; entity sets (accessor properties), entity types (the classes representing tables/views/etc), properties (fields/members) all use the names from the database. This is fine if the naming conventions used in the database match .net naming conventions, but in reality many people use other naming conventions in database schemas than in .net code for a variety of reasons.
Manually renaming all entity sets, entity types and properties to use .net naming conventions after running the EF import database wizard - for nice standardized names in the .net code - can be a lengthy exercise already on a medium sized data model.
(Click on the screenshot for a larger view)
2) The add-in plugs into the Tools menu in Visual Studio, adding a new option “Standardize ADO.NET Entity Data Model class and member names” whenever the entity data model designer is open. (Long menu name, I know. Maybe I’ll rename it some day…)
3) After selecting the “standardize…” tool, an options dialog will appear. This dialog allows the user to control whether to apply ProperCase (TitleCase) to names, remove underscores, pluralize accessors, remove suffixes/prefixes such as “tbl_”, “int_”, add new prefixes/suffixes etc etc.
(Click on the screenshot for a larger view)
4) ..and after hitting OK in the options dialog, the add-in will process all entity sets, entity types, properties, navigation properties etc and update the names according to the rules specified:
(Click on the screenshot for a larger view)
It is all pretty straightforward, but this function really saves a lot of time when importing database schemas into the Entity Framework designer. As the screenshot above shows it spared me from having to re-type (or rename) the 1777 classes and properties generated from the HuagatiRes database by hand, and instead automated the whole process and updated the entire conceptual layer in a matter of seconds.
This new add-in function along with other (yet to be released) EDMX / EF-related functionality comes packaged together with the DBML functionality in the Huagati DBML Tools add-in. If you want to try it out, you can download a trial version and get a trial license key from http://www.huagati.com/dbmltools/ , and if you like it I hope that you upgrade to either one of the paid-for versions to support continued development.
If you already have a license for the DBML Tools add-ins, you can upgrade by simply downloading and copying the latest version over your existing version and re-start Visual Studio.