Question

I’ve been noticing when I pull things out of the my MSSQL db using LINQ-to-SQL using something simple like:

    public IEnumerable<Contact> GetAll()
    {
        var Contacts = from c in _context.Contacts
                      select new Models.Contact
                      {
                          ContactID = c.ContactID,
                          FirstName = c.FirstName,
                          LastName = c.LastName,
                          Email = c.Email,
                          Phone = c.Phone,
                          Address1 = c.Address1,
                          Address2 = c.Address2,
                          City = c.City,
                          State = c.State,
                          Zip = c.Zip,
                          HighImportance = (bool)c.HighImportance,
                          PrimaryContact = (bool)c.PrimaryContact,
                          OfficeLocation = c.OfficeLocation
                      };
        return Contacts;
    }

I have a complex object (foreign key reference) to an OfficeLocations table which I would like to populate. If I do something like:

_context.OfficeLocations.SingleOrDefault(ol => ol.OfficeLocationID == c.OfficeLocationID);

Then this returns the type which is generated by my DBML. Up to now I’ve been using something like:

OfficeLocation = new OfficeLocation
            {
                OfficeLocationID = c.OfficeLocationID,
                Name = c.OfficeLocation.Name,
                Phone = c.OfficeLocation.Phone
            }

But I feel like there should be a much better way to do it, maybe by using extension methods on my DBML data objects or something?

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Answer 1

You should checkout AutoMapper. It’s a very good library that would help you setup mapping between objects in your application. For example, you might have domain entities and a layer of DTO’s; then you can use AutoMapper to map from your entities to the corresponding DTO’s, which I assume is what you’re looking to do.