Mapping to an existing schema

Quino is a metadata-first framework. The standard way of creating metadata is to create it using the modeling API in C#.

Quino derives the names of the database-schema elements from the names of various elements of the metadata. An application can control this mapping with the ISchemaIdentifierBuilder and ISchemaIdentifierBuilderSettings, which, in turn, use the low-level IIdentifierTransformer and IIdentifierBuilder.

Consider the following class with a single property in a model named Punchclock.

Elements.Person = Elements.Module
  .AddClass(nameof(Elements.Person));

Elements.Person
  .AddProperty("FirstName", MetaType.Text);

The Person class maps to the table punchclock__person. The FirstName property of that class maps to punchclock__person.firstname.

• What if an application wants to build a model that maps to an existing database schema?
• That is, what if the table and column name are already defined in a legacy database, but the application would still like to map a model onto it?
• Can the application define the model using a different naming scheme?

Suppose the FirstName property above should map to tblPerson.Vorname. We extend the code above as follows.

Elements.Person = Elements.Module
  .AddClass(nameof(Elements.Person))
  .SetSchemaIdentifier("tblPerson");

Elements.Person
  .AddProperty("FirstName", MetaType.Text)
  .SetSchemaIdentifier("Vorname");

Instead of automatically calculating its own schema identifiers, Quino uses the ones assigned in the model.