I am currently using EF 4 with my ASP.NET Website to access a MySql database. This works fine. However I now want another Web Site project to access the same entities. How do I set this up?
I can’t just reference the original website as it’s a Web Site, not a Web Application. So presumably, I need to put the Entity Data Model in its own project and compile to a DLL. But…
- Which project type?
- Do I just cut and paste the DataModel.edmx and DataModel.Designer.cs, compile and add a reference in both websites? What about namespaces?
- Where do I put the connection string? At the moment it’s in my project’s Web.config.
I really have no idea where to begin – I’ve just followed tutorials to get EF working up to now! I’d really appreciate step-by-step instructions if anyone has time. Thanks.
The model should be placed in a new class library project. My preference would be to recreate the model at this point based on the existing model. For the namespace I like to use {CompanyName}.DataAccess. Remove the old model from your web site project, add a reference to the new class library project and build the web site project. The website project will break in many places, but it should be a simple matter of changing the namespace to the new data access assembly. I prefer this method as to cut/paste because now you have nice clean namespaces. Be careful of any places you may have strings with entity names in them, like if you were using Include (if you are using EF 4 and lazy loading, this should not be a problem). Leave the connection string in web.config for both of the web site projects. When you create the model in the class library, it will add a connection string in app.config. That is OK, it is just there so the model knows how to connect to the database when you refresh it.