Question

For example Service Stack does this to with the Northwind database:

http://www.servicestack.net/ServiceStack.Northwind/customers/ALFKI?format=html 

Is there anything that reads the database structure and relationships and output a report based on a primary id?

Obviously, I am looking into alternatives to servicestack.

Answer 1

I use LINQPad’s .Dump() object visualizer for that. Download LINQPad from http://www.linqpad.net and reference the .exe in your project.

You will then have access to LINQPads .CreateXhtmlWriter() that can output a beautiful object graph visualization:

just by going:

var listOfItems = DataContext.Items.ToList();

listOfItems.Dump();

The following is not my code, but I cannot find the origin, so bear with me.

Use extension method to create the Xhtml dump and show it a browser:

public static class LinqPadExtensions
{
    /// <summary>
    /// Writes object properties to HTML 
    /// and displays them in default browser.
    /// </summary>
    /// <typeparam name="T"></typeparam>
    /// <param name="o"></param>
    /// <param name="heading"></param>
    public static void Dump<T>(
        this T o,
        string heading = null
    )
    {
        string localUrl =
            Path.GetTempFileName() + ".html";
        using (
            var writer =
                LINQPad.Util.CreateXhtmlWriter(true)
        )
        {
            if (!String.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(heading))
                writer.Write(heading);
            writer.Write(o);
            File.WriteAllText(localUrl, writer.ToString());
        }

        Process.Start(localUrl);
    }
}