This is a helpful series for when you need to start doing any sort of validations on your entities. I need to dig more into OData and how it integrates nicely with NG and friends using .NET. Personal notes follow.
Notes
1 Data Layer Validation with Entity Framework DbContext 41:23
- Where do you want to validate? How? When? What results?
- DbContext API brings Validation API
- Don’t use it outside your data layer man!
- System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations for typical validation stuff
- This is validation only, completely unrelated to schema stuff
- You can implement custom type validations
- See K. Scott Allen Model Validation & Metadata in ASP.NET MVC 2 (MSDN Magazine)
IValidatableObjectinterface is one way to do custom type validations- Pretty curious where this will fit
- DbContext.ValidateEntity gets called for each tracked entity
- Last stop for checking stuff
- DbEntryValidationResult
- ValidationErrors
- DbValidationError
- ErrorMessage
- PropertyName
- DbValidationError
- DbValidationError
- IsValid
- Entry
- ValidationErrors
- Love how you may use
Aliasobjects to play withDbContext - Validation work-flow steps to failure
- Property level validation
- Complex Type level validation
- Entity Type level validation
- Kind of a big deal for understanding the flow and how you will utilize all
sorts of validations in a system
- ValidationAttributes
- Are a subset of code-first annotations
- Existed before EF
- CF fluent mappings pull double duty with Required and MaxLength both for
annotations and EF - Check on ebook for this stuff; don’t want to take very detailed notes
2 Customizing Entity Framework Data Layer Validation 34:45
- Validation work-flow and extensibility points
- GetValidationResult
- ValidateEntityEntry
- GetValidationErrors
- DetectChanges
- SaveChanges
- Can change
- SaveChanges won’t trigger validation
- GetValidationErrors only checks modified entities
- ValidateEntity can add more data layer validations
- Overriding DbContext::ValidateEntity
- Before watching this series, think through how you want to handle data
identity through the tiers (database, logic, service, UI) and how you
want to enforce rules in each of them and how you want to communicate
breakage - ShouldValidateEntity():boolean
- Might run into special cases, OK
- Like deletes, OK, interesting rules
- Can’t delete stuff that is less than 24h old
- Can express every system as a “rules engine”, lol
- SaveChanges is where relationships are verified; call the base
- The IDictionary argument is interesting for sequencing and access-control
- The Unsung hero of the dcontext…
3 Integrating Entity Framework Validation with MVC and WCF Data Services 37:59
- How will we integrate the Validation API and OData and NG?
- Skipped MVC stuff
- Matt Milner, OData and data services