ASP.NET Providers for the ADO.NET Entity Framework

Introduction

One of the most powerful improvements of ASP.NET 2.0 was truly the introduction of the membership, role and profile providers. They allow to rapidly integrate user management, role based security as well as visitor based page customization into your ASP.NET application. The name already indicates that they all implement the provider model design pattern.

Unfortunately, Microsoft doesn't have these providers ready to download leveraging the ADO.NET Entity Framework.

The downloadable source from this article provides a ready-to-use implementation for the above mentioned providers. The following article gives a quick overview about providers and it describes what it takes to get the provided source up and running.

In order to understand the source, sound knowledge of LINQ is inevitable. Furthermore, it is important that readers understand the philosophy behind ASP.NET providers.The following link gives a good overview of the ASP.NET providers.

Background

Provider Model Design Pattern

provider_overview.JPG

The provider model pattern was designed to provide a configurable component for data access which is defined from the web.config. The Provider interfaces between the Business logic and Data Access. The actual concrete implementation of the provider is defined in the web.config. Custom providers can be built and configured in the web.config without changing the application design. Providers are a subclass of the ProviderBase class and typically instantiated using a factory method.

Various providers for the same purpose can co-exist and easily be configured in the web.config.

Database Schema

The database schema is closely related to the one that gets created by aspnet_regsql.exe:

provider_database_schema.JPG

The resulting Entity Model looks like the following:

provider_entity_model.JPG

Other than Microsoft's ASP.NET providers for SQL, the presented solution here does not use stored procedures. Instead, all the queries are implemented in the respective providers source using LINQ.

Exposed APIs


See full detail: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/aspnet/AspNetEFProviders.aspx

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