Question

I go in and add a new “linq to sql classes” in Visual Studio and then go and drag a table from Database Explorer to the new DBML and the name of the new class is no longer plural. What if I still want it to be plural? If I drag a table that isn’t plural I get a bunch of compile errors about how there is already a type definition for all of the fields in the table I put on the dbml layout. If I then make the class name plural for the table that wasn’t plural in the dbml layout by clicking on the name and changing it then no more compile errors.

Answer 1

You can single click on the tablename in the dbml table and rename it. Or you can select the table in the DBML and go to the properties window. There you can change the name, and the table it hooks up to.

One way to avoid the name conflict is to designate namespaces accordingly. For example, you can place your DBML file in a subfolder in your project and assign it something like DataAccess. Therefore, when you map to the Ling2Sql class, you’d do DataAccess.Customer and you can avoid the conflict with Customer, since it lives somewhere else.

As a tidbit, Linq2Sql by default makes tables non-plural. It’s based off of a convention. For example, a table Customers has many customers. When you instantiate an object, you’re looking at a single Customer, not the table. The object is essentially being mapped to a row in the Customers table, thus it becomes singular.