Creating Array of settings names and values using ADO.NET Entities
- by jordan.baucke
I'm using an ADO.NET Entities (.edmx) data-model along with MVC2 to build an application.
I have a DB table where I want to store settings for method that run elsewhere.
MVC2 allows me to create a view, editor, etc. to update this table which is great, but now when I want to do simple assignments based on column titles I'm a bit confused.
For example, I would like to easily build an array that I could offset into the record's value based on it's "Title" Column:
var entities = new ManagerEntities();
Setting[] settings = entities.settings.ToArray();
This returns something like:
Settings[0].[SettingTitle][SettingValue]
However, I would like to more easily index into the value than having to loop through all the returned settings, when they're already index.
string URL_ID_NEED = [NeededUrl][http://www.url.com]
Am I missing something relatively simple?
Thanks!
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*Update*
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Ok, I think I've got a solution, but I'm wondering why this would be so complicated, and if I'm just not thinking of the right context for ADO.NET objects, here's what I did:
public string GetSetting(string SettingName)
{
var entities = new LabelManagerEntities();
IEnumerable<KeyValuePair<string, object>> entityKeyValues =
new KeyValuePair<string, object>[] {
new KeyValuePair<string, object>("SettingTitle", SettingName) };
EntityKey key = new EntityKey("LabelManagerEntities.Settings", entityKeyValues);
// Get the object from the context or the persisted store by its key.
Setting settingvalue = (Setting)entities.GetObjectByKey(key);
return settingvalue.SettingValue.ToString();
}
This method handles the job of querying the Entities by "Key" to get back the correct value as a returned string (which I can than strip out the " ", or or cast to an integer, etc. etc.,)
Am I just duplicating functionality that already exists in ADO.NET's design patterns (I'm pretty new to it) -- or is this a reasonable solution?
