Dapper.SimpleSave A Getting Started Tutorial for CRUD Operations

Overview

Dapper.SimpleSave is a small library package that adds basic CRUD operations to Dapper. Dapper easily retrieves data from the database when a single object is involved, but when you are dealing with complex hierarchies, then dapper is not very helpful.

This is where Dapper.SimpleSave comes in and saves complex objects to the database in a very simple way.

• Dapper.SimpleSave is intended to support what EF users would call a "database first" scenario. I.e., you already have a database, and you want an easy way to get data in and out of it from a .NET application.
• It doesn't do any kind of code or schema generation for you: you should already have a schema, and you'll write simple POCO entities from which Dapper.SimpleSave will save data to the database.

How Dapper.SimpleSave Works?

Dapper.SimpleSave saves data to the database through the following processes:

• Perform a deep comparison between the current object and the previous version of that object, and build a list of differences.
• Use the list of differences to build a list of operations that describe the changes that need to be made to the corresponding database rows to make them match the new version of the object.
• Use the list of operations to build a list of commands that will provide the template for the SQL that will be generated - in particular, coalesce updates into a single command for each row.
• Use the list of commands to build the minimum number of parameterized SQL batches that will update the database with the required changes.
• Execute the SQL batches sequentially as a single database transaction to update the database, resolving any previously unknown primary key values before each batch is executed.

Attributes

Dapper.SimpleSave needs to decorate your domain classes with the attribute, for example;

• Names of the tables and columns in a database.
• Which property represents primary key columns.
• The cardinality of relationships between tables etc.

[Table("Invoices")]
public class Invoice
{
    [PrimaryKey]
    public int? Id { get; set; }
    public string Code { get; set; }
    public InvoiceKind Kind { get; set; }

    [OneToMany]
    public List<InvoiceItem> Items { get; set; }

    [OneToOne]
    public InvoiceDetail Detail { get; set; }
}

NuGet Installation

Dapper.SimpleSave is only available through NuGet: https://www.nuget.org/packages/Dapper.SimpleSave/

You can easily install this library by running the following command:

PM> Install-Package Dapper.SimpleSave

More information can be found at: https://github.com/Paymentsense/Dapper.SimpleSave/

APIs

Once you installed this library then the following extension methods will automatically add to DbConnection:

• Create
• CreateAll
• Update
• UpdateAll
• Delete
• DeleteAll
• SoftDelete
• SoftDeleteAll

You can use these extension methods easily in your code.

connection.Create(invoice);

connection.Update(oldInvoice, newInvoice);

connection.Delete(invoice);

connection.SoftDelete(invoice);

You can find the detailed documentation here: https://github.com/Paymentsense/Dapper.SimpleSave/wiki/

Limitations

Current limitations:

• Convention-based mapping is not supported, and you will need to decorate your domain classes with attributes.
• Currently, only integer, long, and GUID primary keys are supported.
• In all your domain classes, a primary key property should be marked with a [PrimaryKey] attribute.

Support

Unfortunately, this library is not supported.

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