I'm curious what would be the best practice for using the DataAccesAdapter.

Would be this class design acceptable ? The class is used in a windows service application.

public class CustomerService
{
    private IDataAccessAdapter dataAccessAdapter;
    
    public CustomerService(IDataAccessAdapter dataAccessAdapter)
    {
        this.dataAccessAdapter = dataAccessAdapter;
    }

    public CustomerEntity GetItem(int Id)
    {
        var customer = new CustomerEntity(Id);

        this.dataAccessAdapter.FetchEntity(customer);

        return customer;
    }

    public EntityCollection<CustomerEntity> GetList()
    {
        var coll = new EntityCollection<CustomerEntity>();

        this.dataAccessAdapter.FetchEntityCollection(coll,null);

        return coll;
    }
}

I looked up in the doc, but there isn't much info about how dataaccessadapter is working behind the scenes.

I saw often this pattern

    public CustomerEntity GetItem(int Id)
    {
        var customer = new CustomerEntity(Id);

        using(var adapter = new DataAccessAdapter())
        {
            adapter.FetchEntity(customer);  
        }

        return customer;
    }

but when there gonna be like 10 - 15 method in the class, the code would starts get messy.

The "using" clause is essential to ensure that the database connection is closed and resources are released. You could put this outside your class, but how would that be any less messy than having it inside ?

FWIW, my manager classes tend to look very much like yours, but with the "using" statements.

If you are using C#3.0 you can use generics to create a single method to retrieve entities

public T GetEntity<T>(int Id) where T : EntityBase2
{

 using(var adapter = new DataAccessAdapter())
        {
            T entity = new T;
            (entity as EntityBase2).PrimaryKeyFields[0].Value = Id;
            adapter.FetchEntity(entity);    
        }

}

usage

CustomerEntity cust = GetEntity<CustomerEntity>(1);

et voila - one single method as opposed to one per entity type. You can do something similar with entity collections as well.

I realize that this is an old thread, but I wanted to point out that the PrimaryKeyFields property is private which means that your code will not compile.

I am trying to delete an entity based on its primary key. Any suggestions?

rboarman wrote:

I am trying to delete an entity based on its primary key. Any suggestions?

That property comes from the IEntity2 interface, so it's public. Anyway I think you already had this working (http://www.llblgen.com/TinyForum/Messages.aspx?ThreadID=20763)