I've converted part of the store to use the Entity Framework - to make it easy to update category and product tables and not have to manage all of the stored procedures when a field changes.  And this seems to work ok, though I need to update the web.config with an entity connection string on install.  Is there a way to do that from a dnn install package?

Thanks,

Jay

Apart from the web.config, the problem to package a module with an EF model is the {DatabaseOwner} and {ObjectQualifier} settings, which are uselly hardcoded in the model.

I can imagine a scenario where you would want to package your Entity Frameworked Store for your own customers, but if you wanted to distribute it, you would have to dynamically inject DatabaseOwner and ObjectQualifier into the model.

I remember that Brandon Haynes has a solution for that but I don't know if he went further. At that time we had discussions with Gilles about integrating an EF model in the Store package, but we decided that it was a bit early.

Anyway, I digress from your initial question. We'll be glad to hear from your experience with EF. There is a serie of 3 blogs I wrote in april-june 2009 and you might reactivate them with new perspectives, particularly those that could have been brought by EF 2 that did not exist at that time.

http://www.dotnetnuke.com/Community/Blogs/tabid/825/EntryId/2215/Discover-Entity-Framework-with-DotNetNuke-and-the-Store-module.aspx

http://www.dotnetnuke.com/Community/Blogs/tabid/825/EntryId/2238/Store-Entity-framework-and-Dynamic-Data.aspx

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Benoît Sarton
www.bsi.fr
www.dotnetnuke.fr

Hi Jay,

You should have a look at this post from Brandon and to the related project at Codeplex, may be this could help! ;-)

Gilles

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