CoNatural.Data v1.3 just released.
Roger Torres - September 11th, 2009
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I just released a new version of the CoNatural.Data components (version 1.3). You can find the latest source code at http://conatural.codeplex.com.
This version required some code refactoring to support multiple CoNatural command factories in a single application. A command factory is just a concrete implementation of a mechanism to translate CoNatural commands to the internal representation used by the framework.
In the previous releases, there was only one command factory embedded inside the Command constructor, and the only mechanism supported was reading command assemblies via reflection and extracting parameters from properties and SQL scripts from the “.sql” file associated with the reflected types. In this new version, the same factory has been implemented in a new class “DefaultCommandFactory”, also optimized to process and cache command definitions by type.
A new ICommandFactory interface is also available for other implementations, making it more IoC (Dependency Injection) friendly, and also more testable. Now, user defined command types won’t need to inherit from CoNatural.Data.Command, but implement the empty ICommand interface. Note that this change is not backward compatible, but a simple project wide find/replace from “Command” to “ICommand” will take care of the problems.
If you have been using this framework, you might be wondering why the change now? Well, one of my clients needed to build CoNatural commands dynamically from metadata stored in a SQL Server database. After trying with static commands, modifying the scripts on the fly and applying IgnoreParameter attributes to the type properties, I decided that the best way to accommodate this requirement was by defining the command factory abstraction and move the default implementation to a new concrete class. This solution is cleaner, more testable, allows me to better mock some parts of the system and leaves my client with the responsibility to build its own command factory without further framework pollution. I hope we can describe the resulting work in future posts.
If you have any problems with the new changes or suggestions for new features, please let me know here, by email, or at the Codeplex site.
Thanks
Roger
