Question

For my CMS application I’m writing a DLL that I will include into my projects. That DLL will include functionality like retrieving all news for a specific project.

For instance, my database contains a table called News. By using the Entity Framework 4 I have a automatic generated class called News. I do not want my DLL methods return this object rather than a wrapper class, that only contains properties.

How should I name this wrapper class?
For now I’ve always appended the word “Container”, but over the time I do dislike this suffix. Meaning, I would now name this class NewsContainer.

Of course I could name this wrapper class also News. This would work because I’d have two classes in two separate namespaces, but I’d rather not name two different classes the same. Is is ok, two name to different classes the same? I’m asking this, because News would actually the best name fit.

Edit: I do manually map the properties between my own wrapper class and the automatic generated entity framework class, if that is of any importance.

Answer 1

I’d agree with your initial naming of your wrapper/DTO class as News. Keeping them in separate namespaces with the same names is perfectly fine. That’s part of what namespaces are for: to reduce collisions in naming.

I’d sketch out something like this

namespace MyCmsApp.Models
{
    public class News {
        public string Title { get; set; }
        public string Body { get; set; }
        public string Author { get; set; }
    }
}

I’d then have the DataLayer return only types within the MyCmsApp.Models. In other words, as you were suggesting, the EF generated classes don’t cross over into your app.

Side note: why are you trying to avoid using the EF classes? Would you consider code-first and/or Model-First design? In those scenarios, the database bends to your application’s object model design.