Retrieve SQL Output parameters in your BOM with CodeFluent Entities

 
 
Let’s say you have an existing stored procedure that uses OUTPUT parameters to retrieve some data and you want to access it in your Business Object Model (BOM) as an object method.
 
If you can modify your procedure you might want to use a more OOP (Object Oriented Programming) approach. It will be more flexible and it is what CodeFluent Entities follows.
 
But let’s suppose you don’t have the possibility to modify your stored procedure.
 
We will use an existing model to illustrate this post. We will work with the ContactManager demo project available within the CodeFluent Entities project templates in Visual Studio.
 
This is how our existing stored procedure looks like, it has 2 OUTPUT parameters.
 

CREATE PROCEDURE [dbo].[legacy_procedure]
(
@param1 [int] OUTPUT,
@param2 [nvarchar] (256) OUTPUT
)
AS
BEGIN
--some interesting code here
select @param1 = 42
select @param2 = 'answer'
END
GO

 

We create a method called “LegacyProcedure” related to the entity Contact

 

 
We need to create a “raw” method and specify the parameters for our method.
 
As we want to use an existing stored procedure we leave the body empty.

 
As we will work with an existing stored procedure we need to tell our method to use our existing stored procedure, and not to create his own persistence stored procedure.

 
In the method advanced properties at the “persistence” level we set “Persistence Name” (it must be the same name as the stored procedure).

 
Now we tell the persistence producer not to produce the stored procedure.
To do that we go to the “Aspect and Producer Properties” of our method and set the “Produce” value to False.

 
Finally we need to define the parameters that are used in our method.

 
The parameter names must be the same as those declared in our method (as well as the type).

 
Now we need to set the persistence parameter direction. Displaying the advanced properties, in the persistence group we set the direction to “Output”.

 
Supposing that you have a “Persistence producer” and a “Business Object Model producer” (BOM) we build the CodeFluent Entities project.
 
If you have a CodeFluent Entities version former to the Build 1.0.61214.707, then you will have a compile error while building the generated BOM project.

 
The solution would be to disable the generation of our method and code it by hand in a partial class.
 
But, since Build 1.0.61214.707 CodeFluent Entities now supports the “out” and “ref” parameters in persistence methods.
 
After installing the new version, we build the CodeFluent Entities project. If we take a look at our generated method we will see that the “out” parameters are now handled by our BOM.

 
 
Regards,
Pablo Fernandez Duran
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