Entity Developer Features

Entity Developer offers a number of visual designer tools and code generation features to help you design ORM models faster and generate professional and extensible code for them.
There are three options available: standalone, console, and Visual Studio integration.

Wide Mapping Support

Edit nearly any kind of mapping for all the supported ORMs visually.

Visual editors for classes, properties, complex types, enums
Support for various kinds of inheritances and associations
Mapping CRUD operations to stored procedures
Create methods from stored routines or command texts
Visual editing of a storage part of Entity Framework v1-v7 models
Table splitting, entity splitting, query views
and many more...

Database-First Approach Support

Easily generate a model from a database and apply database changes to the model. Switch to model-first whenever necessary.

Generate a model from a database in a few clicks
Apply changes of the database schema to the model
Configure generation with lots of various options
Flexibly configure naming of generated classes, members, and methods
Get from database to ready-to-use code in minutes

Model-First Approach Support

Create a model and then generate a database from it automatically. Apply model changes to the database without losing data where possible.

Generate a database from a model in a few clicks
Specify a default set of properties to be added to each new entity
View, select, and apply model changes to the database
Flexibly configure naming of generated tables and columns

Visual Studio Integration

Entity Developer is seamlessly integrated into Visual Studio; however, if you don't have Visual Studio, you still can use Entity Developer as a separate application.

Design model directly in the IDE
Visual Studio 2008 - 2022 support
Refactoring integration
Code is generated when you save the model
Errors in model are displayed in Visual Studio Error List
Model diagrams, template editor behave like usual IDE documents
Documentation is integrated into Visual Studio documentation

Entity Deeloper as a Visual Studio add-in

Powerful Refactoring

Powerful Model Refactoring wizard allows you to quickly configure mapping aspects that cannot be automatically generated from database. It allows you to create:

inheritance hierarchies,
complex types,
table splitting

in just a couple of clicks.

Optimized Work with Large Models

Entity Developer is optimized to ensure comfortable and efficient work with large models, containing thousands of entities.

Highly optimized metadata retrieving
Split model into several thematic diagrams
Fast code generation

Splitting a large model into multiple diagrams

LINQ Query Execution against Models

Execute LINQ, Entity SQL, or HQL queries (depending on the ORM used) without the need to finish your application.

Test your model at design-time
Preview the returned data and browse related entities
View and edit data of the database tables directly

Template-Based Code Generation

Template-based code generation system in Entity Developer can satisfy even the most demanding developers.

Generate C# or Visual Basic code
T4-template based code generation
Editable templates

Wide Choice of Predefined Templates

Entity Developer offers a large set of predefined templates for generating C# or Visual Basic code for various needs.

Templates for POCO or persistence aware classes
Fluent or XML mapping
Templates for DTO classes
Templates for Data Annotation Metadata
Templates for WCF RIA Service
MVC controller and view templates
And more...

Flexible Generation Settings

Entity Developer allows you to configure code generation to a large extent with template properties, custom attribute support, extended properties for model objects, etc.

Generate all classes to one file or file per class
Configure project folders to output files
Generate extensible partial classes with code behind
Configure generation with template properties
Specify attributes to use for model objects

Custom Templates Support

Even if the standard Entity Developer code generation is not enough for you, you can achieve virtually anything by creating your own custom templates, even generate code for other programming languages.

Convenient template editor with syntax highlight
Store templates with model or in ED resources
Add properties for model objects that affect generation
Get unlimited generation capabilities

Console Support

Entity Developer provides 32-bit and 64-bit console applications that allow automating code generation/database updates and performing common operations via console commands:

Generate model from database
Validate model
Generate code from model
Generate create database from model script
Generate update database from model script