Proposal: Can we have an Identical Tool that is not bound to EF?

Hi @ErikEJ , hope your day went well. The tools you developed is very awesome and thank you for this. It is a great help to the community.

You know, I am also an OSS contributor and is maintaining a Micro-ORM that is open for .NET Community and such tool is an alternative to EF as we speak. Though, I am also thinking to build the similar tools you had created for the EF Core, but it seems appropriate to just instead tap you and collaborate with you the desired tools we are trying to build.

It is also an option to combine the knowledge to develop such tools.

Proposal

We would like to propose if you can create a tool that is dedicated to an ORM that is of micro-ORM kind. Such tool should address the case if the .NET community uses the Dapper or RepoDB ORM as an alternative to EF. We saw that there is a lot of users who will gonna use such tool. In the case of Dapper, see the statistics of the downloads here. This is a testament that the .NET community has a lot of use-case outside the coverage of EF itself.

Therefore, I am personally thinking that, it is good if YOU can cover this well.

Disclaimer

The current tool you had develop can also address the use-case, but the end-user needs to tweak the template by using the handle bars and simply eliminating all the EF related stuffs.

Benefits

It much easier and direct to the end-users if the tool is not bound to EF, in the case of users that are using the other ORM. The tool you developed has the code base that is well tested and might be easy to port to a new Project/Solution and create such new thing - with a different target users. We can leverage on that maturity and well-tested functionality by the community.

How Should It Be?

To start with:

There should be an additional context menu like below.

PowerTools -> Generate Schema/Reverse Engineer

Keeping it as simple as possible, you can just eliminate all the DbContext related thing.

Connection Screen:

Just an enhancement, not really needed. There should be remove button on this page.

Selection Screen:

It is good if we can as well consider the columns?

Generate Screen:

In the generate screen, only the following is present.

• Namespace
• Entity Types
• Sub-Namespaces
• What to Generate (EntityTypes = Table, Views)
  • It is also good if there is an option to select the columns to generate per table (only if needed)
• Data annotation attributes
• Connection string

Note: The relationship must also be an option, though this can be done via template as well. But it is really good if we can control it in UI.

Advance Screen:

The following should only be present.

• Map spatial types
• Map Noda Time types

When OK is clicked:

The following folders will be created.

• EntityType

All of the the DB Contexts related thing will be eliminated on the generation.

[ErikEJ]

I will implement both, and add two options for now.

[sm15455]

@sm15455 #692 is related to this, I guess?

Yes. Waiting for the end of the month to start working on that.