Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
FIGURE 2.4
Choosing database objects.
When you click Finish, the Entity Data Model Wizard creates a new EDMX file, adds it to
the project, and opens it in an Entity Designer window shown in Figure 2.5.
The diagrams used by the Entity Framework should be familiar to most database develop-
ers because they closely resemble database and UML diagrams. The newly created entity,
Product, is displayed as a rectangle with a list of scalar properties derived from the
columns of the Products table.
The Entity Designer relies on the Properties window of Visual Studio to display and allow
you to modify various elements of the model, such as the names of the entity types, their
access/visibility, properties, and so on. Explore the new entity model by selecting the
entity and its property items in the Entity Designer and observing the information avail-
able in the Property Window. Notice that in addition to the names, data types, and other
attributes, the Entity Designer also allows you to specify a short Summary and/or a Long
Description for every item in the model, making it a reasonably good place to store devel-
oper-focused documentation of the data model—even though this information is not
available in Dynamic Data applications by default.
