Scenario
I’m parsing emails and inserting them a database using an ORM (NHibernate to be exact). While my current approach does technically work I’m not very fond of it but can’t of a better solution. The email contains 50~ fields and is sent from a third party and looks like this (obviously a very short dummy sample).
Field #1: Value 1 Field #2: Value 2
Field #3: Value 3 Field #4: Value 4 Field #5: Value 5
Problem
My problem is that with parsing this many fields the database table is an absolute monster. I can’t create proper models employing any kind of relationships either AFAIK because each email sent is all static data and doesn’t rely on any other sources.
The only idea I have is to find commonalities between each field and split them into more manageable chunks. Say 10~ fields per entity, so 5 entities total. However, I’m not terribly in love with that idea either seeing as all I’d be doing is create one-to-one relationships.
What is a good way of managing large number of properties that are out of your control?
Any thoughts?
Create 2 tables: 1 for the main object, and the other for the fields. That way you can programatically access each field as necessary, and the object model doesn’t look to nasty.
But this is just off the top of my head; you have a weird problem.
If the data is coming back in a file that you can parse easily, then you might be able to get away with creating a command line application that will produce scripts and c# that you can then execute and copy, paste into your program. I’ve done that when creating properties out of tables from html pages (Like this one I had to do recently)