I have the following model
public class SummaryModel
{
public int CompanyCount { get; set; }
public int GroupCount { get; set; }
public int ProjectCount { get; set; }
public int ResourcesCount { get; set; }
public int PeopleCount { get; set; }
}
I would like to use linq to query my database and return record counts from multiple tables and populate this model object.
This is how I am doing it:
using (var ctx = new WeWorkModel.weWorkEntities())
{
var summary = new SummaryModel()
{
CompanyCount = ctx.Companies.Count(),
PeopleCount = ctx.People.Count(),
GroupCount = ctx.Groups.Count(),
ProjectCount = ctx.Projects.Count(),
ResourcesCount = ctx.Resources.Count()
};
}
Is this the most efficient way to do this?
Yes, this is the most efficient way - equivalent to writing sql query as this does not fetch the objects but only does a count on the server. So something like this ( using profiler I tracked the query)
SELECT
[GroupBy1].[A1] AS [C1]
FROM ( SELECT
COUNT(1) AS [A1]
FROM [dbo].[Company] AS [Extent1]
) AS [GroupBy1]
Do you need to store this model in a database or change it's values after instantiating? If no, why not put this code block inside of a parameterless constructor and mark the fields readonly as to avoid using this model differently than intended. If you find later you need greater control over initialization of fields, simply add another constructor to deal with that specific case. To the main question, I see nothing particularly inefficient with your way of handling it. Although, with code there is nearly always terser ways or more efficient ways of handling just about any scenario.
Related
We have a lot of Dto classes in our project and on various occasions SELECT them using Expressions from the entity framework context. This has the benefit, that EF can parse our request, and build a nice SQL statement out of it.
Unfortunatly, this has led to very big Expressions, because we have no way of combining them.
So if you have a class DtoA with 3 properties, and one of them is of class DtoB with 5 properties, and again one of those is of class DtoC with 10 properties, you would have to write one big selector.
public static Expression<Func<ClassA, DtoA>> ToDto =
from => new DtoA
{
Id = from.Id,
Name = from.Name,
Size = from.Size,
MyB = new DtoB
{
Id = from.MyB.Id,
...
MyCList = from.MyCList.Select(myC => new DtoC
{
Id = myC.Id,
...
}
}
};
Also, they cannot be reused. When you have DtoD, which also has a propertiy of class DtoB, you would have to paste in the desired code of DtoB and DtoC again.
public static Expression<Func<ClassD, DtoD>> ToDto =
from => new DtoD
{
Id = from.Id,
Length = from.Length,
MyB = new DtoB
{
Id = from.MyB.Id,
...
MyCList = from.MyCList.Select(myC => new DtoC
{
Id = myC.Id,
...
}
}
};
So this will escalate pretty fast. Please note that the mentioned code is just an example, but you get the idea.
I would like to define an expression for each class and then combine them as required, as well as EF still be able to parse it and generate the SQL statement so to not lose the performance improvement.
How can i achieve this?
Have you thought about using Automapper ? You can define your Dtos and create a mapping between the original entity and the Dto and/or vice versa, and using the projection, you don't need any select statements as Automapper will do it for you automatically and it will project only the dto's properties into SQL query.
for example, if you have a Person table with the following structure:
public class Person
{
public int Id { get; set; }
public string Title { get; set; }
public string FamilyName { get; set; }
public string GivenName { get; set; }
public string Initial { get; set; }
public string PreferredName { get; set; }
public string FormerTitle { get; set; }
public string FormerFamilyName { get; set; }
public string FormerGivenName { get; set; }
}
and your dto was like this :
public class PersonDto
{
public int Id { get; set; }
public string Title { get; set; }
public string FamilyName { get; set; }
public string GivenName { get; set; }
}
You can create a mapping between Person and PersonDto like this
Mapper.CreateMap<Person, PersonDto>()
and when you query the database using Entity Framework (for example), you can use something like this to get PersonDto columns only:
ctx.People.Where(p=> p.FamilyName.Contains("John"))
.Project()
.To<PersonDto>()
.ToList();
which will return a list of PersonDtos that has a family name contains "John", and if you run a sql profiler for example you will see that only the PersonDto columns were selected.
Automapper also supports hierachy, if your Person for example has an Address linked to it that you want to return AddressDto for it.
I think it worth to have a look and check it, it cleans a lot of the mess that manual mapping requires.
I thought about it a little, and I didn't come up with any "awesome" solution.
Essentially you have two general choices here,
Use placeholder and rewrite expression tree entirely.
Something like this,
public static Expression<Func<ClassA, DtoA>> DtoExpression{
get{
Expression<Func<ClassA, DtoA>> dtoExpression = classA => new DtoA(){
BDto = Magic.Swap(ClassB.DtoExpression),
};
// todo; here you have access to dtoExpression,
// you need to use expression transformers
// in order to find & replace the Magic.Swap(..) call with the
// actual Expression code(NewExpression),
// Rewriting the expression tree is no easy task,
// but EF will be able to understand it this way.
// the code will be quite tricky, but can be solved
// within ~50-100 lines of code, I expect.
// For that, see ExpressionVisitor.
// As ExpressionVisitor detects the usage of Magic.Swap,
// it has to check the actual expression(ClassB.DtoExpression),
// and rebuild it as MemberInitExpression & NewExpression,
// and the bindings have to be mapped to correct places.
return Magic.Rebuild(dtoExpression);
}
The other way is to start using only Expression class(ditching the LINQ). This way you can write the queries from zero, and reusability will be nice, however, things get harder & you lose type safety. Microsoft has nice reference about dynamic expressions. If you structure everything that way, you can reuse a lot of the functionality. Eg, you define NewExpression and then you can later reuse it, if needed.
The third way is to basically use lambda syntax: .Where, .Select etc.. This gives you definitely better "reusability" rate. It doesn't solve your problem 100%, but it can help you to compose queries a bit better. For example: from.MyCList.Select(dtoCSelector)
I'm having a performance issue with lookups using the navigation properties of an EF model.
My model is something like this (conceptually):
public class Company
{
public int ID { get; set; }
public string CompanyName { get; set; }
public EntityCollection<Employee> Employees { get; set; }
}
public class Employee
{
public int CompanyID { get; set; }
public string EmployeeName { get; set; }
public EntityReference<Company> CompanyReference { get; set; }
}
Now let's say I want to get a list of all Companies that have (known) Employees.
Additionally, assume that I've already cached lists of the both the Companies and the Employees through previous calls:
var dbContext = new EmploymentContext();
var allCompanies = dbContext.Companies.ToList();
var allEmployees = dbContext.Employees.ToList();
bool activeCompanies =
allCompanies.Where(company => company.Employees.Any()).ToList();
This (in my environment) generates a new SQL statement for each .Any() call, following the Employees navigation property.
I already have all the records I need in my cached lists, but they're not 'connected' to each other on the client side.
I realize I can add .Include() calls to my initial cache-fill statement. I want to avoid doing this because in my actual environment I have a large number of relations and a large number of lists I'm populating up front. I'm caching largely to keep Linq from generating overly-complicated nested SQL statements that tend to bog down my database server.
I also realize I can modify my query so as to do an in-memory join:
bool activeCompanies = allCompanies.Where
(
company => allEmployees.Any(employee => employee.CompanyID == company.ID)
);
I'm trying to avoid doing such a rewrite, because the actual business logic gets rather involved. Using Linq statements has significantly improved the readability of this logic, and I'd prefer not to lose that if at all possible.
So my question is this: can I connect them together manually somehow, in the way that the Entity Framework would connect them?
I'd like to continue to use the .Any() operator, but I want it to examine only the objects I have in memory in my dbContext - without going back to the database repeatedly.
I have a database base first application so I have no homemade modals as such, just the ones created automatically. I want to display in a single view the one and many parts from a select in single row in an html table/list, here is the SQL that works great in a re-created MS Access Query, - some brackets:
SELECT Facilitiy.FacilityName, Facilitiy.FacilityImage, FacilityDetail.FacilityDetailDescription
FROM FacilityDetail INNER JOIN Facilitiy ON FacilityDetail.FacilityDetailID = Facilitiy.FacilityFK
WHERE FacilityFK = id
And the LINQ that gives me the correct many part of the list:
from fd in db.FacilityDetails
join f in db.Facilities on fd.FacilityID equals f.FacilityFK
where f.B FacilityFK == id
select f
I had kind of hoped that would do it as the SQL does but I need to create a modal that I can put in a view to display:
FacilityImage(one side) | FacilityName(one side) | FacilityDetailDescription(many side)
I have heard I can simply do it by doing something like this???
from fd in db.FacilityDetails.Include("Facilities")
but it seems to make no difference!
Which leads me to believe I need to create a new custom model? If so how would i write it?
I tried something like this but I cant get it to work.
public class FacilitiyDetails
{
public string FacilitiesDescription { get; set; }
public string FacilitiesImage { get; set; }
public string BeachFacilitiesDescription { get; set; }
{
I'm not quite sure what i'm supposed to do here!
Yes you will need a custom model because you're wanting to display multiple types. You'll need to have something like:
public class FacilityModel
{
public Facility Facility { get; set; }
public List<FacilityDetails> FacilityDetails { get; set; }
}
Based on your class above and assuming you have a Facility class already. Then you'll need to change your LINQ to first get the Facility details:
var facility = (from f in db.Facilities
where f.FacilityID == id
select f)
.FirstOrDefault(); //just being safe here,
//if it's null, you'll want to escape out of
//the code below
Then you'll need to get all equivalent FacilityDetails for that facility by doing:
var facilityDetails = (from fd in db.FacilityDetails
where fd.FacilityFK == id
select fd).ToList()
Then you can create a new instance of your Model by doing:
var model = new FacilityModel
{
Facility = facility,
FacilityDetails = facilityDetails
};
Given the follow data class,
public class EmployeeMenu
{
public int ID { get; set; }
public string HeaderName { get; set; }
public List<string> ItemNames { get; set; }
}
how can I get a sub-query into the ItemNames field?
My current query of
IQueryable<EmployeeMenu> retValue =
from mh in menuHeaders
select new EmployeeMenu
{
ID = mh.ID,
HeaderName = mh.HeaderName,
ItemNames = (from mhi in mh.MenuItems
select mhi.MenuItemName).ToList<string>()
};
doesn't seem to be doing the trick...
The data structure is
MenuHeaders MenuItems
----------- ---------
ID ID
HeaderName <-(FK)--MenuHeaderID
MenuItemName
I ended up just changing from a List to IEnumerable. This fixed it.
Wouldnt you want to just put a where in your sub-select to filter that down to all the menu items with the MenuHeaderID equals mh.HeaderName. You can just .Equals() with the StringComparison type if you want as well.
Here is an example...
IQueryable<EmployeeMenu> retValue =
from mh in menuHeaders
select new EmployeeMenu
{
ID = mh.ID,
HeaderName = mh.HeaderName,
ItemNames = (from mhi in mh.MenuItems
select mhi.MenuItemName where mhi.MenuHeaderID = mh.HeaderName).ToList<string>()
};
My guess is that your not initiliazing the list within your class. I basing this off the experience I was having with Nhibernate.
public class EmployeeMenu
{
public int ID { get; set; }
public string HeaderName { get; set; }
public List<string> ItemNames { get; set; }
public EmployeeMenu()
{
ItemNames=new List<string>();
}
}
Hope this helps.
Okay. Try replacing
(from mhi in mh.MenuItems
select mhi.MenuItemName).ToList<string>()
by
mh.MenuItems
.AsEnumerable()
.Select(mhi => mhi.MenuItemName)
.ToList()
I question if you want a where clause in there somewhere, but this should get you past the runtime exception.
Any time you see an error message of the form "LINQ to Entities does recognize the method ... and this method can not be translated into a store expression" LINQ to Entities is telling you that it can't figure out how to translate part of the expression tree into a SQL statement. This means you need to pull things client side so that LINQ to Entities doesn't try to translate something that it can't translate.
The basic problem...
I have a method which executes the following code:
IList<Gig> gigs = GetGigs().WithArtist(artistId).ToList();
The GetGigs() method gets Gigs from my database via LinqToSql...
So, when GetGigs().WithArtist(artistId).ToList() is executed I get the following exception:
Member access 'ListenTo.Shared.DO.Artist Artist' of 'ListenTo.Shared.DO.Act' not legal on type 'System.Collections.Generic.List`1[ListenTo.Shared.DO.Act]
Note that the extension function "WithArtist" looks like this:
public static IQueryable<Gig> WithArtist(this IQueryable<Gig> qry, Guid artistId)
{
return from gig in qry
where gig.Acts.Any(act => (null != act.Artist) && (act.Artist.ID == artistId))
orderby gig.StartDate
select gig;
}
If I replace the GetGigs() method with a method that constructs a collection of gigs in code (rather than from the DB via LinqToSQL) I do NOT get the exception.
So I'm fairly sure the problem is with my LinqToSQl code rather than the object structure.
However, I have NO IDEA why the LinqToSQl version isnt working, so I've included all the associated code below. Any help would be VERY gratefully receivced!!
The LinqToSQL code....
public IQueryable<ListenTo.Shared.DO.Gig> GetGigs()
{
return from g in DBContext.Gigs
let acts = GetActs(g.ID)
join venue in DBContext.Venues on g.VenueID equals venue.ID
select new ListenTo.Shared.DO.Gig
{
ID = g.ID,
Name = g.Name,
Acts = new List<ListenTo.Shared.DO.Act>(acts),
Description = g.Description,
StartDate = g.Date,
EndDate = g.EndDate,
IsDeleted = g.IsDeleted,
Created = g.Created,
TicketPrice = g.TicketPrice,
Venue = new ListenTo.Shared.DO.Venue {
ID = venue.ID,
Name = venue.Name,
Address = venue.Address,
Telephone = venue.Telephone,
URL = venue.Website
}
};
}
IQueryable<ListenTo.Shared.DO.Act> GetActs()
{
return from a in DBContext.Acts
join artist in DBContext.Artists on a.ArtistID equals artist.ID into art
from artist in art.DefaultIfEmpty()
select new ListenTo.Shared.DO.Act
{
ID = a.ID,
Name = a.Name,
Artist = artist == null ? null : new Shared.DO.Artist
{
ID = artist.ID,
Name = artist.Name
},
GigId = a.GigID
};
}
IQueryable<ListenTo.Shared.DO.Act> GetActs(Guid gigId)
{
return GetActs().WithGigID(gigId);
}
I have included the code for the Act, Artist and Gig objects below:
public class Gig : BaseDO
{
#region Accessors
public Venue Venue
{
get;
set;
}
public System.Nullable<DateTime> EndDate
{
get;
set;
}
public DateTime StartDate
{
get;
set;
}
public string Name
{
get;
set;
}
public string Description
{
get;
set;
}
public string TicketPrice
{
get;
set;
}
/// <summary>
/// The Act object does not exist outside the context of the Gig, therefore,
/// the full act object is loaded here.
/// </summary>
public IList<Act> Acts
{
get;
set;
}
#endregion
}
public class Act : BaseDO
{
public Guid GigId { get; set; }
public string Name { get; set; }
public Artist Artist { get; set; }
}
public class Artist : BaseDO
{
public string Name { get; set; }
public string Profile { get; set; }
public DateTime Formed { get; set; }
public Style Style { get; set; }
public Town Town { get; set; }
public string OfficalWebsiteURL { get; set; }
public string ProfileAddress { get; set; }
public string Email { get; set; }
public ImageMetaData ProfileImage { get; set; }
}
public class BaseDO: IDO
{
#region Properties
private Guid _id;
#endregion
#region IDO Members
public Guid ID
{
get
{
return this._id;
}
set
{
this._id = value;
}
}
}
}
I think the problem is the 'let' statement in GetGigs. Using 'let' means that you define a part of the final query separately from the main set to fetch. the problem is that 'let', if it's not a scalar, results in a nested query. Nested queries are not really Linq to sql's strongest point as they're executed deferred as well. In your query, you place the results of the nested query into the projection of the main set to return which is then further appended with linq operators.
When THAT happens, the nested query is buried deeper into the query which will be executed, and this leads to a situation where the nested query isn't in the outer projection of the query to execute and thus has to be merged into the SQL query ran onto the DB. This is not doable, as it's a nested query in a projection nested inside the main sql query and SQL doesn't have a concept like 'nested query in a projection', as you can't fetch a set of elements inside a projection in SQL, only scalars.
I had the same issue and what seemed to do the trick for me was separating out an inline static method call that returned IQueryable<> so that I stored this deferred query into a variable and referenced that.
I think this is a bug in Linq to SQL but at least there is a reasonable workaround. I haven't tested this out yet but my assumption is that this problem may arise only when referencing static methods of a different class within a query expression regardless of whether the return type of that function is IQueryable<>. So maybe it's the class that holds the method that is at the root of the problem. Like I said, I haven't been able to confirm this but it may be worth investigating.
UPDATE: Just in case the solution isn't clear I wanted to point it out in context of the example from the original post.
public IQueryable<ListenTo.Shared.DO.Gig> GetGigs()
{
var acts = GetActs(g.ID); // Don't worry this call is deferred
return from g in DBContext.Gigs
join venue in DBContext.Venues on g.VenueID equals venue.ID
select new ListenTo.Shared.DO.Gig
{
ID = g.ID,
Name = g.Name,
Acts = new List<ListenTo.Shared.DO.Act>(acts),
Description = g.Description,
StartDate = g.Date,
EndDate = g.EndDate,
IsDeleted = g.IsDeleted,
Created = g.Created,
TicketPrice = g.TicketPrice,
Venue = new ListenTo.Shared.DO.Venue {
ID = venue.ID,
Name = venue.Name,
Address = venue.Address,
Telephone = venue.Telephone,
URL = venue.Website
}
};
}
Note that while this should correct the issue at hand there also seems to be another issue in that the deferred acts query is being accessed in each element of the projection which I would guess would cause separate queries to be issued to the database per row in the outer projection.
I don't see anything in your classes to indicate how LINQ to SQL is meant to work out which column is which, etc.
Were you expecting the WithArtist method to be executed in .NET, or converted into SQL? If you expect it to be converted into SQL, you'll need to decorate your Gig class with appropriate LINQ to SQL attributes (or configure your data context some other way). If you want it to be executed in code, just change the first parameter type from IQueryable<Gig> to IEnumerable<Gig>.
I found out that an issue like this (which I also had recently) can be resolved, if you convert the IQueryable (or Table) variable Gigs into a list like so
return from g in DBContext.Gigs.ToList()
...
If that still doesn't work, do the same for all the IQueryables. The reason behind seems to me that some queries are too complex to be translated into SQL. But if you "materialize" it into a list, you can do every kind of query.
Be careful, you should add "filters" (where conditions) early because too much memory consumption can become a problem.