Question

I need a solution for an enterprise environment with 100s of applications and SQL databases. A current architecture standard requires that all applications implement DALs using SPROCs. One reason for this is that, when performing ongoing migration, obsolescing or modifications to databases, dependency graphs between these SPROCs and database objects (including dependencies to objects on linked servers) indicate what applications will be impacted by migrating or removing a database.

If one were to change the architectural standard to allow ORMs (e.g. LLBLGen, Entity Framework v4, …), producing dependency graphs this way would not be possible anymore.

Any ideas on how we can produce dependency graphs between DALs implemented in .NET and DB objects? The solution needs to work statically (i.e. mustn’t rely on ‘mionitoring’ db access during runtime).

I can imagine that the solution might be product/technology specific in which case assume LLBLGen for the DAL and SQL Server for the database.

Answer 1

I got an answer from LLBLGen:

Dependency from entity onto table, you
mean? What dependency are you looking
for exactly? For example, if you have
400 tables / views and 30 entities
mapped onto them, there are a lot of
tables/views which aren’t mapped and
therefore the application doesn’t
depend on them, is this what you’re
after?

This is easy to generate from a
template into whatever output you
want. Using a .lpt template you can
traverse the EntityDefinition
instances in the project object and
emit to the output the target they’re
mapped on. This gives you a list of
targets the project depends on. This
can be done statically, on the command
line using the command line generator.
See the SDK for details about writing
templates. Of cource you can also do
this in a plugin (as it also has
access to the entire object graph) and
for example export it to excel in your
plugin by opening a form and bind it
to a grid which supports exporting to
Excel. In v3, this is build into the
designer, you can then query the
project using any query you want
(using Linq, inside the designer) and
export the output to excel or other
formats.