Entity Framework in layered architecture
- by Kamyar
I am using a layered architecture with the Entity Framework. Here's What I came up with till now (All the projects Except UI are class library):
Entities: The POCO Entities. Completely persistence ignorant. No Reference to other projects. Generated by Microsoft's ADO.Net POCO Entity Generator.
DAL: The EDMX (Entity Model) file with the context class. (t4 generated). References: Entities
BLL: Business Logic Layer. Will implement repository pattern on this layer. References: Entities, DAL. This is where the objectcontext gets populated: var ctx=new DAL.MyDBEntities();
UI: The presentation layer: ASP.NET website. References: Entities, BLL + a connection string entry to entities in the config file (question #2).
Now my three questions:
Is my layer discintion approach correct?
In my UI, I access BLL as follows:
var customerRep = new BLL.CustomerRepository();
var Customer = customerRep.GetByID(myCustomerID);
The problem is that I have to define the entities connection string in my UI's web.config/app.config otherwise I get a runtime exception. IS defining the entities connectionstring in UI spoils the layers' distinction? Or is it accesptible in a muli layered architecture.
Should I take any additional steps to perform chage tracking, lazy loading, etc (by etc I mean the features that Entity Framework covers in a conventional, 1 project, non POCO code generation)?
Thanks and apologies for the lengthy question.
