Today I had the great privilege of meeting Julie Lerman, the famed author of the book “Programming Entity Framework.” I had a couple of questions regarding entity framework so I figured I should ask the master. I had previously created a video/demo describing how to use entity framework as the data source for our reports but wanted to take it a bit further and see if we could do a master-detail type binding to the generated entity objects. Here is what I’ve learned:
1. I am not doing it exactly the right way.
2. Julie is the person to ask about it.
3. It’s a good thing she wrote a book.
She walked me through exactly whet we actually get with the model file. The she proceeded to help out with a Linq query that automatically prefetches the data required for an object based one-to-many.
Once I understood how to build the object graph, binding it to the report was simple:
The Field list contains the entire definition built up from the model file. The only thing left to do was create a detail report, set the data source and data member and start dragging over the desired fields.
Here is what Julie had to say:
Just watched @devexpress report display EF graph data in a report. That's graph as in related data. Haven't seen any other rpt tool do that
I have come to the conclusion that our reporting tools can bind to just about anything. I was happy that EF was one of those things. I am also grateful to Julie for spending a few minutes with me! She said she might pop by tomorrow. What questions should I ask?
As always, if there are any questions and/or comments feel free to get a hold of me.
Seth Juarez
Email: sethj@devexpress.com
Twitter: @SethJuarez
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