Community Attribute Builder final

If you are working with Relate+ platform most probably you are using entities attributes to attach some additional info to particular entity type. This is a great way to extend built-in functionality but however involved a bit of manual work:

You have to define attribute for each of the entity in Relate+ administrative UI (which honestly speaking could be made more user friendly).
You have to refer to the attribute via stringly-typed interface.

Latter for me is most embarrassing.

instance.SetAttributeValue("attributeName", attributeValue);

This approach could give you few real scenarios where such is unacceptable:

When you will margin for a grammar error when typing attribute name – that could be discovered only during runtime.
You cannot use static code analysis tools. Like to search for all attribute usages.
You cannot use some of the refactoring tools –> like rename attribute name.
You can easily change type of the attribute and forget about code that uses that, effect –> runtime error(s).
Use cannot leverage all the power of Visual Studio (for instance to provide Intellisense over available attributes)

So therefore I created package that should relief tasks with Community entity’s attributes – Community Attribute Builder.

There were already some posts on this topic here, here and there. Latest version (1.0) is out and this is just a summary of what’s supported.

1. Describe community entity’s attributes in code. Those attributes defined in metadata class are synced during application start-up and added to the target entity:

[CommunityEntity(TargetType = typeof(IUser))]       
public class SampleAttributeMetadata       
{       
    [CommunityEntityMetadata]       
    public virtual IList<SampleType> SampleAttribute { get; set; }       
}

2. Limit scanning of the assemblies:

<configuration>       
  <configSections>       
    <section name="entityAttributeBuilder" type="Geta.Community.EntityAttributeBuilder.EntityAttributeBuilderConfiguration, Geta.Community.EntityAttributeBuilder" />       
  </configSections>       
      
  <entityAttributeBuilder>       
    <scanAssembly>       
      <add assembly="EntityAttributes" />       
      <remove assembly="RemoveAssembly" />       
    </scanAssembly>       
  </entityAttributeBuilder>       
        
</configuration>

3. You can set or get entity’s attribute value(s) using strongly-typed interface.

var metadata = instance.AsAttributeExtendable<SampleAttributeMetadata>();       
metadata.SampleAttribute = null;

4. Support for strongly typed queries

var query = new UserQuery();       
var qmetadata = query.AsMetadataQuery<SampleAttributeMetadata>();       
qmetadata[m => m.SampleAttribute] = new StringCriterion { Value = "the attribute value" };

5. Added support for IList<T> type attributes. You can assign via local variable assignment and modification or using line modifications.

var entity = instance.AsAttributeExtendable<SampleAttributeMetadata>();       
      
// getter       
var collection = entity.SampleAttribute;       
collection.Add(new SampleType(100));       
// setter       
entity.SampleAttribute = collection;

or you can use more convenient syntax:

var entity = instance.AsAttributeExtendable<SampleAttributeMetadata>();      
entity.SampleAttribute.Add(new SampleType(100));

Rename, deletion and content migration for the community entity attributes need to me done manually.

Can be found here (or search by “community” in NuGet package manager).

I somebody is really curious how to implement interfaces like these – strongly-typed interface over stringly-typed one, some basics could be found here.

Source could be found in GitHub.

Hope this helps!

Jun 09, 2012

Comments

Jun 13, 2012 12:41 PM

Very useful, nice work! Now we got PTB and CAB :)

Please login to comment.