We have an n-tiers architecture :
-a WCF Service that communicates with the database and handles all the business logic.
-an ASP.NET MVC website that communicates with the WCF service.
Here is a scenario of data serialization-deserialization from the database to the html view of a ‘guitar’:
-Guitar_1 a class generated by linq,
-Guitar_2 the DataContract exposed by the WCF service, and consumed by the ASP.NET MVC website.
-Guitar_3 the model passed to the View
When an end user wants to retrieve a guitar, Guitar_1 is transformered into Guitar_2 and then into Guitar_3. That’s really not a problem but if the end user requests a list of guitars then all this process is repeated for each guitar (a loop).
If i had to programmatically handle all the serialization-deserialization stuff, i’d had only one class per layer. It could still be done for example on the wcf project by annoting ‘DataContract’/’DataMember’ on the Linq class, but if I refresh my database model all my annotations disappear (Same case ont the ASP.NET MVC project, refreshing the service reference deletes all the added code).
Also, Is it really more productive to use these automatic serializers? the time taken to write a serializer-deserializer takes as much time as annoting classes (DataContract/DataMember) and handling the conversion of class Guitar_1 to Guitar_2… Add to that the loss of perofrmance (Loop and conversion)…
What do you guys think? Do some of you code as in the old days because of this?
UPDATE: As suggested by ‘Abhijit Kadam’, I used partial classes when consuming a webservice, however, I found a better solution when using Linq2SQL : POCO classes.
If the main concern is that the model classes created by framework are automatically regenerated and you changes like annotations on such classes are wiped out THEN in this case you can use partial classes, info here. If the auto generated class is Employee. Then in separate file create a partial class Employee and include the fields in this partial defination that you want to annotate. This class will not be wiped out and regenarated. However when you compile the code the resultant Employee class will be combination of the Original Employee class + the partially defined Employee class.
Also converting from class Guitar_1 to Guitar_2 is OK and at times we have to do such things to meet specific requirements. I prefer JSON data to be transferred across the network wire like from WCF to MVC Web and then browser will fetch the json data from the MVC APP. Then I use frameworks like jsrender or knockout to render the data as HTML on the client side(browser). JSON is readable, compact and javascript and javascript libraries love json.