Visual Designer for Telerik Data Access

Since Q2 2015 version, Telerik Data Access ORM does not include a visual model designer and uses code only mapping. Entity Developer Professional Editions supports Telerik Data Access and allows you to design models visually and generate code only mapping for the most recent Telerik Data Access version.

Moreover, Entity Developer offers significantly better support for Telerik Data Access mapping than the deprecated Telerik Data Access Visual Designer and has features that were never available in the native designer.

The list of these features includes powerful template-based code generation, ability to test your model with LINQ queries at design-time, advanced support for large models, etc.

Model-First, Database-First, or Mixed

With our designer you can use either Model-First or Database-First design approach for Telerik Data Access, or you may mix them in any way you like. Easy-to-use Update From Database and Update To Database wizards allow you to synchronize your model and database in any directions at any moment.

Update From Database Wizard tries to preserve manual changes to the model where possible. The Update From Database and Update To Database wizards detect all the database changes that can affect the model and vice versa, e.g. created and deleted tables and views, their columns and foreign keys, column datatype changes, etc.

All changes are displayed in an easy-to-understand form, and you can select only a part of the changes to apply. When updating database schema, Entity Developer considers database server specificity. It does not try to perform unsupported operations.

Tweak the Database-First Settings

When using database-first approach, Entity Developer provides a number of options for creating a model. You may tweak naming rules for the generated names of the classes and their members. Entity Developer allows you to configure case and pluralization, removing and adding of prefixes and suffixes, etc.

After this you may set the default parameters for the generated classes: default assembly and namespace, default schema, cascade style, strategy for accessing a property value, default identity generator and its parameters, etc.

Easy to Start, Easy to Use

Designing Telerik Data Access models with Entity Developer is easy and intuitive. Only the most frequently used mapping parameters are accessed through the editor dialog boxes, making our editors simple and easy to understand. If you need more extended mapping tuning, you can find all the available parameters of a model object in the Properties window.

All the mapping is defined visually, you don't need to tweak it in the code.

Telerik Data Access Designer Dialog Boxes

Rich Mapping Editors

Entity Developer supports almost all features of Telerik Data Access mapping. It supports complex types, all kinds of associations, and msot kinds of inheritance mapping strategies.

Advanced Drag-and-drop Support

To accelerate model design process, our designer provides wide support for drag-and-drop functionality. After you have established a database connection, you may drag database tables and views from the Database Explorer window to your model diagram to create classes for these tables with already defined mapping.

To quickly create a TPC or TPH hierarchy in a model, reverse-engineered from a database, you may just drag several properties from the class to create a base or derived class from them. In the same way you may quickly create a Telerik Data Access complex type from a set of class properties.

Keep Your Model Valid

Our Telerik Data Access designer always validates your model while you are editing it. All errors and warnings automatically appear in the Error List window. Error list displays error or warning message and its location.

You can easily navigate to the object that caused an error by double-clicking it in the Error List window. Thus you may find and fix model errors quickly and conveniently.

Generate Ready to Use Telerik Data Access Code

Telerik Data Access Entity Generation

With Entity Developer you may generate classes and mapping from the existing database in a few steps. Entity Developer generates POCO classes in C# or Visual Basic and supports third-party ADO.NET providers for SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL, DB2, and SQLite.

Our Telerik Data Access designer comes with useful settings of Telerik Data Access code generator:

Entities Output property allows you to specify output folder or output Visual Studio project for generated entities.
File Per Class option allows you to choose whether to generate classes either into a single code file or into a separate code file for each persistent class. This setting is used by default.
Generate Partial Classes property enables generation of partial classes with a separate file for generated code and a file for user code per class (Code-behind).

Telerik Data Access Generator Capabilities

You can configure Entity Developer to generate classes with or without Equals and GetHashCode implementation, IValidatable interface implementation, and support for IPropertyChanging and IPropertyChanged events.

Telerik Data Access Configuration Generation

Entity Developer is also capable to generate Telerik Data Access configuration code to the App.config file of the project or to the OpenAccessContext class. Configuration parameters are set in the Model Settings dialog box.

Seamless Visual Studio Integration

Like the deprecated Telerik Data Access Visual Designer, Entity Developer seamlessly integrates to Visual Studio. The model is created and edited just like any other Visual Studio project item. Code for a model is generated each time you save the model and is automatically placed to the project, containing the model, by default. You may redirect code output to other Visual Studio project if necessary.

If you need, you can use Entity Developer as a separate application as well.

Test Your Model at Design-Time

Our Telerik Data Access designer allows viewing and editing data of tables, views, and model entities, create and execute LINQ queries against the model, eliminating the need for additional applications and reducing time for accessing these operations.

Preparing Test Data

With Entity Developer you may perform viewing and quick editing of the database data from the tables in the Database Explorer. This data is editable, allowing you to quickly insert some data into the database to perform some testing.

Designing and Debugging LINQ Queries

Our Telerik Data Access designer allows you to execute LINQ queries directly against the model without the need to write a sample application. You can use our built-in query editor to design queries, which can be saved for future use, and view the returned data and generated SQL.