Linq - how does it work??
- by clarkeyboy
Hey,
I have just been looking into Linq with ASP.Net. It is very neat indeed. I was just wondering - how do all the classes get populated? I mean in ASP.Net, suppose you have a Linq file called Catalogue, and you then use a For loop to loop through Catalogue.Products and print each Product name. How do the details get stored? Does it just go through the Products table on page load and create another instance of class Product for each row, effectively copying an entire table into an array of class Product?
If so, I think I have created a system very much like this, in the sense that there is a SiteContent module with an instance of each Manager class - for example there is UserManager, ProductManager, SettingManager and alike. UserManager contains an instance of the User class for each row in the Users table. They also contain methods such as Create, Update and Remove. These Managers and their "Items" are created on every page load. This just makes it nice and easy to access users, products, settings etc in every page as far as I, the developer, am concerned. Any any subsequent pages I need to create, I just need to reference SiteContent.UserManager to access a list of users, rather than executing a query from within that page (ie this method separates out data access from the workings of the page, in the same way as using code behind separates out the workings of the page from how the page is layed out).
However the problem is that this technique seems rather slow. I mean it is effectively creating a database on every page load, taking data from another database. I have taken measures such as preventing, for example, the ProductManager from being created if it is not referenced on page load. Therefore it does not load data into storage when it is not needed.
My question is basically whether my technique does the exact same thing as Linq, in the sense of duplicating data from tables into properties of classes..
Thanks in advance for any advice or answers about this.
Regards,
Richard Clarke