The Entity Framework is an object-relational mapper that bridges the gap between object-oriented programming and relational databases. It generates business objects and entities from database tables and allows CRUD operations and managing relationships. Benefits include writing data access logic in higher-level languages and replacing the underlying data store without much overhead. The Entity Framework architecture includes an Entity Data Model that maps objects to the database using three layers - conceptual, storage, and mapping. The EDM can now be created using database first, model first, or code only approaches.

1. Entity Framework
(EF)
Eng. Mahmoud Ouf
Lecture 1
mmouf@2017

2. What Is the Entity Framework?
• The Entity Framework is a set of technologies in ADO.NET that helps
fill in the space between object oriented development (objects) and
databases.
• This gap is commonly known as an “impedance mismatch” and it
exists because the mapping and organization of classes does not quite
match up to the organization of relational objects.
mmouf@2017

3. What Is the Entity Framework?(cont.)
• It generates business objects and entities according to the database
tables and provides the mechanism for:
1. Performing basic CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) operations.
2. Easily managing "1 to 1", "1 to many", and "many to many"
relationships.
3. Ability to have inheritance relationships between entities.
mmouf@2017

4. What are the benefits of using it?
1. We can have all data access logic written in higher level languages.
2. The conceptual model can be represented in a better way by using
relationships among entities.
3. The underlying data store can be replaced without much overhead
since all data access logic is present at a higher level.
mmouf@2017

5. Is it an alternative to ADO.NET?
• Yes because the developer will not be writing ADO.NET methods and
classes for performing data operations.
• No because this model is actually written on top of ADO.NET,
meaning under this framework, we are still using ADO.NET.
mmouf@2017

6. The Entity Framework Architecture
Application
Entity Framework
Entity Data Model (EDM)
Describe Object Relational Mapping
ADO .NET Provider
Data Store
ORM Interface
mmouf@2017

7. Entity Data Model
• The Entity Data Model (EDM) is the foundation of the Entity
Framework and is comprised of the three Layers
• These three layers allow data to be mapped from a relational database
to a more object-oriented business model.
• ADO.NET EF 3.5 defines these layers using XML files. These XML
files provide a level of abstraction so developers can program against
the OO conceptual model instead of the traditional relational data
model.
mmouf@2017

8. Entity Data Model(Cont.)
• The conceptual Layer:
Is defined in an XML file using Conceptual Schema Definition Language
(CSDL). CSDL defines the entities and the relationships as the application’s
business layer knows them.
• The Storage (logical) Layer:
Which represents the database schema, is defined in an XML file using Store
Schema Definition Language (SSDL)
• The Mapping Layer:
Which is defined using Mapping Schema Language (MSL), maps the other two
layers. This mapping is what allows developers to code against the conceptual
model and have those instructions mapped into the logical model.
mmouf@2017

9. Creating EDM:
• From the beginning of EF, you could generate the EDM from an existing
Database.
• Starting from Visual Studio 2010 and .Net Framework 4.0, there was a
significant improvement regarding the creation of EDM. Now we have
three ways for creating an EDM:
1)Database First: this is the traditional way by creating the EDM from Existing
Database.
2)Model First: Allows you to start with an empty model, define your model and then
generate the database, mappings, and classes from the defined model.
3)Code Only: Allows you to use the Entity Framework using Plain Old CLR Objects
(POCO) entities and without an EDMX file
mmouf@2017