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I would like to suggest a feature that was part of a beta LINQ to SQL designer that didnt make it into the RTM That is the ability to put custom attributes on entities/properties generated by the designer. I loved that feature and used it to Tag UI information on my Entities I have developed a workaround using Interfaces and attributes on them but sure miss that old feature for speed of development and ease of management. If I were you I would make this a feature only available to paid customers for fear of someone using your awesome designer(express version) with a free ORM that that uses attributes for mapping. It would be a motivating reason to upgrade |
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Hi MiddleTommy, Just so you're not left wondering - thanks for your feedback. We are indeed planning on adding custom attributes capability to the designer in the future however I can't promise an exact time when this will appear. Thanks again for the feedback, John-Daniel |
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Hello MiddleTommy, We now have support for this, beginning in nightly builds dated 6 Dec 2008, available from about 1430 GMT. The user interface is a bit primitive at the moment but we hope you will take it out for a spin all the same and see if it helps you with your UI tagging. A couple of things that may be confusing at first (I did warn you the UI was a bit primitive): - To edit the attributes, you will need to click into the relevant "Custom Attributes" box in the property grid. This causes an ellipsis button to appear, which takes you to the real editor. (You can also add attributes via the Model Explorer, though this isn't available for associations.) - In the edit dialog, if your attributes have parameters, you enter them as name-value pairs. For parameters passed to as constructor arguments (rather than as named arguments), leave the name blank. Also, be aware that what you type in the parameter value box is *exactly* what gets emitted into the code. Therefore string parameters must be quoted, e.g. for DescriptionAttribute, the parameter value should be "Some Text" (with double quotes) rather than Some Text (without quotes). Similarly if you have an attribute that takes a decimal, you must enter it as e.g. 12.5m rather than 12.5. Hope this makes sense! (The reason for this is that we don't know the data types of parameter arguments so we have no way of emitting the correct "warts" for the type.) Cheers, |
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I will try it out Thankyou |
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I think the user interface is nice and serves the purpose well. But one problem is that my CustomAttributes are in a different namespace than the entity model. Anyway to add a using namespace statement in the designer? |
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