In my last post I went for a warts n all approach to set up a web role on Azure. In this post I’ll describe how to add an SQL Azure database to the project. This will be described with an as minimal as possible amount of code
and screen dumps. All questions are welcome in the comments area. Please don’t email since questions answered in the comments field is made available to other visitors. As an example we will add a comments section to the site we used in the previous post (Länk här). Steps: 1. Create a Comments entity
and then use Scaffolding to set up controller
and view,
and add ConnectionString to web.config. 2. Create SQL Azure database in Management Portal
and link the new database 3. Test it online! 1. Right
click Models folder, choose add, choose “class…” . Name the Class Comment. 1.1 Replace the Code in the class with the following: using System.Data.Entity; namespace MvcWebRole1.Models { public class Comment { public int CommentId { get; set; } public string Name { get; set; } public string Content { get; set; } } public class CommentsDb : DbContext { public DbSet<Comment> CommentEntries { get; set; } } } Now Entity Framework can create a database
and a table named Comment. Build your project to assert there are no build errors. 1.2 Right
click Controllers folder, choose add, choose “class…” . Name the Class CommentController
and fill out the values as in the example below. 1.3
Click Add. Visual Studio now creates default View for CRUD operations
and a Controller adhering to these
and opens them. 1.3 Open Web.config
and add the following connectionstring in <connectionStrings> node. <add name="CommentsDb” connectionString="data source=(LocalDB)\v11.0;Integrated Security=SSPI;AttachDbFileName=|DataDirectory|\CommentsDb.mdf;Initial Catalog=CommentsDb;MultipleActiveResultSets=True" providerName="System.Data.SqlClient" /> 1.4 Save All
and press F5 to start the application. 1.5 Go to http://127.0.0.1:81/Comments which will redirect you through CommentsController to the Index View which looks like this:
Click Create new. In the Create-view, add name
and content
and press Create. 1: //
2: // POST: /Comments/Create
3:
4: [HttpPost]
5: public ActionResult Create(Comment comment)
6: {
7: if (ModelState.IsValid)
8: {
9: db.CommentEntries.Add(comment);
10: db.SaveChanges();
11: return RedirectToAction("Index");
12: }
13:
14: return View(comment);
15: }
16:
The default View() is Index so that is the View you will come to. Looking like this:
1: //
2: // GET: /Comments/
3:
4: public ActionResult Index()
5: {
6: return View(db.CommentEntries.ToList());
7: }
Resulting in the following screen dump(success!):
2. Now, go to the Management portal
and Create a new db.
2.1 With the new database created.
Click the DB icon in the left most menu. Then
click the newly created database.
Click DASHBOARD in the top menu. Finally
click Connections strings in the right menu to get the connection string we need to add in our web.debug.config file.
2.2 Now, take a copy of the connection String earlier added to the web.config
and paste in web.debug.conifg in the connectionstrings node.
Replace everything within “ “ in the copied connectionstring with that you got from SQL Azure. You will have something like this:
2.3 Rebuild the application, right
click the cloud project
and choose “Package…” (if you haven’t set up publishing profile which we will do in our next blog post).
Remember to choose the right config file, use debug for staging
and release for production so your databases won’t collide.
You should see something like this:
2.4 Go to Management Portal
and click the Web Services menu, choose your service
and click update in the bottom menu.
2.5 Link the newly created database to your application.
Click the LINKED RESOURCES in the top menu
and then
click “Link” in the bottom menu. You should get something like this.
3. Alright then. Under the Dashboard you can find the link to your application.
Click it to open it in a browser
and then go to ~/Comments to try it out just the way we did locally.
Success
and end of this story!
