RIA Services: Inserting multiple presentation-model objects
- by nlawalker
I'm sharing data via RIA services using a presentation model on top of LINQ to SQL classes. On the Silverlight client, I created a couple of new entities (album and artist), associated them with each other (by either adding the album to the artist's album collection, or setting the Artist property on the album - either one works), added them to the context, and submitted changes.
On the server, I get two separate Insert calls - one for the album and one for the artist. These entitites are new so their ID values are both set to the default int value (0 - keep in mind that depending on my DB, this could be a valid ID in the DB) because as far as I know you don't set IDs for new entities on the client. This all would work fine if I was transferring the LINQ to SQL classes via my RIA services, because even though the Album insert includes the Artist and the Artist insert includes the Album, both are Entities and the L2S context recognizes them. However, with my custom presentation model objects, I need to convert them back to the LINQ to SQL classes maintaining the associations in the process so they can be added to the L2S context.
Put simply, as far as I can tell, this is impossible. Each entity gets its own Insert call, but there's no way you can just insert the one entity because without IDs the associations are lost. If the database used GUID identifiers it would be a different story because I could set those on the client.
Is this possible, or should I be pursuing another design?
