I'm going to do a project that will require pulling a lot of data out of a Microsoft CRM database as well as my database for reporting purposes, probably for use by MS SQL Server Reporting Services. Just wondering....I will use adapter, of course, but I think I would want to pass entities to the report engine just as if these entities come from a single database. But...they don't. If I were using ADO.NET datasets I would probably define my own datasets and then populate them from both dbs. Actually, I guess I could just do that, populate them from entities coming from both dbs, but I try to avoid ADO.NET now if I can help it.

If I want to pass an entity that contains fields from multiple dbs, how would I go about doing that? In the designer I can only create entities that map to a single db.

Coming real soon (1, maybe 2 weeks): 1.0.2004.2, with multiple catalog support. So you can pull entities from multiple catalogs into one project, define custom relations between them and using these pull a typed list based on entities from multiple db's, or for example create a dynamic list or pull an object graph using entities from multiple db's

Oh my god, that's incredible!

. Well it took me 4 weeks of refactoring so I hope it is worth it

Aha, thé answer I was expecting. I think I am like a number of people who want to perform queries from various sources and at this stage the designer wouldn't allow to easily create these situations (especially cumbersome with typed lists). Will there also be heterogeneous updates / saves (e.g. master data in one catalog and details in another) ? I guess the catalogs can have various types ?

Thanks, Charles

PS Thanks for this upgrade! I can now finalise easily the specs of a distributed system involving accounting, eCommerce & CRM, with simultaneous accesses over fat clients and thin clients.

CGrisar wrote:

Aha, thé answer I was expecting. I think I am like a number of people who want to perform queries from various sources and at this stage the designer wouldn't allow to easily create these situations (especially cumbersome with typed lists). Will there also be heterogeneous updates / saves (e.g. master data in one catalog and details in another) ? I guess the catalogs can have various types ?

For the code it doesn't matter to which catalog you're saving the data So you can save an entity graph in a recursive save and it is saved in for example 3 catalogs, that's transparent to you. You do have to use 1 database type, so you can't mix oracle and sqlserver in one LLBLGen Pro project, other than using Adapter and generate 2 projects, which was already possible.

Frans The release you are saying in a week or 2 weeks include entities spanning multiple tables. Thanks.

netLearner wrote:

Frans The release you are saying in a week or 2 weeks include entities spanning multiple tables. Thanks.

No, inheritance is slated for april/may as that will take at least a month or so to get developed OK in all the details of the code.

Entities mapped onto views is in this release though (and relations between entities mapped on views, and thus adding these entities to typed lists...)

Is it possible to specify different connection strings for the different catalogs?

maird wrote:

Is it possible to specify different connection strings for the different catalogs?

Multiple projects you mean? In project properties, you can change Main.ConnectionString, to whatever you like, re-generate the code and then in your .config file speify the connection string with the name you've specified in the project properties. You can also add multiple catalogs to the same project, which means you need just 1 connection string.

Otis wrote:

Multiple projects you mean? In project properties, you can change Main.ConnectionString, to whatever you like, re-generate the code and then in your .config file speify the connection string with the name you've specified in the project properties. You can also add multiple catalogs to the same project, which means you need just 1 connection string.

Here's the scenario I'm thinking of:

I want to have multiple catalogs in the same project that might be in different database instances so i'd like to be able to specify a connection string per catalog within the same project. is that possible or way too complex?