New .Net App – Just add water

I’ve been meaning to post this for a while, only I was planning on covering it with more depth. Life has been a bit busy, so I’m going to post it in it’s current form.

Using FluentMigrator, Fluent-NHibernate, and NHibernate, one can whip up an app fairly quickly. Let’s walk through it in brief.

First, grab the source for FluentMigrator and Fluent-NHibernate from github. Second, build each and put the binaries somewhere practical for your application. Use the NHib binaries from Fluent-NHiberate; otherwise dll versions can be a problem. Now open Visual Studio and create an application. To keep things easy, I’ll make it a WinForm application. Source will be in our OSS project, title InstantApp.

Now add the references to FluentNH, FluentMigrator, and NH. For the count, I added FluentMigrator.dll, FluentMigrator.Runner.dll, Castle.Core.dll, Castle.DynamicProxy2.dll, log4net.dll, and System.Data.SQLite.dll to use sqlite as the database. Don’t worry, the sqlite dll is in the sample code repository. (Update: please refer to the sample for the added dlls. I added others such as NHibernate.linq.)

Now, we need some schema. I recommend keeping schema codefiles in a seperate folder to keep things easy to maintain; so I added a “Migrations” folder in the project. Then added a “first.cs” schema class. Because I am a bit particular, I’m also adding a folder called “Models” to contain the object model classes. In order to wire-up NHib with Fluent-NH, each model will need a mapping class. I’ve added those to the folder “Mappings” under the “Models” folder. Then I’m adding “Tests.cs” because I want to test a couple things.

So far, so good… now we need some code, and because this is fast & dirty, I’m going to whip out the migration code. Let’s keep it to just one table. And add some data.

   1:  public override void Up()

   2:  {

   3:    //users table

   4:    Create.Table("Users")

   5:    .WithColumn("Id").AsInt32().NotNullable().PrimaryKey()

   6:    .WithColumn("Email").AsString(50).NotNullable()

   7:    .WithColumn("Name").AsString(50).NotNullable()

   8:    .WithColumn("Password").AsString(100).NotNullable();

   9:   

  10:    for(int loop = 0; loop < 10; loop++)

  11:    {

  12:      Insert.IntoTable("Users").Row(new { Id = loop, Email = string.Format("email{0}@mail.com", loop),

  13:                                                  Name = string.Format("test name{0}", loop),

  14:                                                  Password = string.Format("password{0}", loop)

  15:      });

  16:    }

  17:  }

  18:   

  19:  public override void Down()

  20:  {

  21:    Delete.Table("Users");

  22:  }

Let’s run this on startup so the table gets created right away. So I added this to Program.cs and called it in Main():

   1:  static void MigrateDatabase()

   2:  {

   3:   //make sure the sqlite db file exists

   4:   if (!File.Exists(DbFile))

   5:   System.Data.SQLite.SQLiteConnection.CreateFile(DbFile);

   6:   

   7:   //run migration

   8:   using (SQLiteConnection connection = new SQLiteConnection(ConnectionString))

   9:   {

  10:    var conventions = new MigrationConventions();

  11:    connection.Open();

  12:    var processor = new FluentMigrator.Runner.Processors.Sqlite.SqliteProcessor(connection, new SqliteGenerator());

  13:    var runner = new MigrationVersionRunner(conventions, processor, new MigrationLoader(conventions));

  14:   

  15:   //upgrade to latest

  16:   runner.UpgradeToLatest(false);

  17:   }

  18:  }

Aaaanndd now.. {drum roll} ..let’s get a list of all the users as take from one of the tests:

   1:  var session = CreateSessionFactory().OpenSession();

   2:  var list = from c in session.Linq<User>()

   3:    select c;

   4:  Assert.True(list.ToList().Count == 10);

Yeah! It passes. So now, just add a data grid view to the WinForm, and the right code.  Wha-bam! You get data in your grid. Pretty nice for less than an hour’s work.

   1:  var session = CreateSessionFactory().OpenSession();

   2:  var list = from c in session.Linq<User>()

   3:   select c;

   4:   

   5:  dataGridView1.AutoGenerateColumns = true;

   6:  dataGridView1.DataSource = list.ToList();

That’s the short intro to building an app with NH, FNH, FluentMigr, and a dash of Linq. See the OSS code for better details.