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Asked: 2026-05-27T14:31:14+00:00

I’m trying to understand choices for code generation tools/ORM tools and discover what solution

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I’m trying to understand choices for code generation tools/ORM tools and discover what solution will best meet the requirements that I have and the limitations present.

I’m creating a foundational solution to be used for new projects. It consists of ASP.NET MVC 3.0, layers for business logic and data access. The data access layer will need to go against Oracle for now, and then switch to SQL this year as the db migration is finished.

From a DTO standpoint mapping to custom types in the solution, what ORM/code generation tool will work with creating my needed code but can ONLY access Stored Procs in Oracle and SQL.?

Meaning, I need to generate the custom objects that are the artifacts from and being pushed to the stored procedures as the parameters, I don’t need to generate the sprocs themselves, they already exist. I’m looking for the representation of what the sproc needs and gives back to be generated into DTOs. In some cases I can go against views and generate DTOs. I’m assuming most tools already do this. But for 90% of the time, I don’t have access directly to any tables or views, only stored procs.

Does this make sense?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    ORMs are best at mapping objects to tables (and/or views), not mapping objects to sprocs.

    Very few tools can do automated code generation against whatever output a sproc may generate, depending on the complexity of the sproc. It’s much more straight-forward to code generate the input to a sproc as that is generally well defined and clear.

    I would say if you are stuck with sprocs, your options for using third party code to help reduce your development and maintenance time are severely limited.

    I believe either LinqToSql or EntityFramework (or both?) are capable of some magic with regards to SQL Server to try to mostly automatically figure out what a sproc may be returning. I don’t think it works all the time, it’s just sophisticated guess work and I seriously doubt it would work with Oracle. I am not aware of anything else software-wise that even attempts to figure out what a sproc may return.

    A sproc can return multiple diverse record sets that can be built dynamically by the sproc depending on the input and data in the database. A technical solution to automatically anticipating sproc output seems like it would require the following:

    1. A static set of underlying data in the database
    2. The ability to pass all possible inputs to the sproc and execute the sproc without any negative impact or side effects

    That would give you a static set of possible outputs for any given valid input. A small change in the data in the database could invalidate everything.

    If I recall correctly, the magic Microsoft did was something like calling the sproc passing NULL for all input parameters and assuming the output is always exactly the first recordset that comes back from the database. That is clearly an incomplete solution to the problem, but in simple cases it appears to be magic because it can work very well some of the time.

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