Demonstrating Attributes and Reflection in .NET

Demonstrating Attributes and Reflection in .NET - Attributes Applied
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Now that we have defined our custom attributes, let's look at a sample class that uses these attributes to specify how a class maps to a table within a database. The Student class below shows the above custom attributes in action.

[DBTable("Student", "dbo")]
class Student
{
private string _id; // id of the student
private string _firstName; // first name
private string _lastName; // last name
private string _address; // address
private int _numCourses; // number of courses

///

/// The ID of the student
///

///
// the student id is the primary key and identifies
// a unique row
[DBPrimaryKeyField("StudentID", DbType.String)]
[DBColumn("student_id", DbType.Guid, false)]
public string ID
{
get
{
return _id;
}
set
{
_id = value;
}
}
///

/// the first name of the student
///

[DBColumn("first_name", DbType.String, false)]
public string FirstName
{
get
{
return _firstName;
}
set
{
_firstName = value;
}
}
///

/// the last name of the student
///

[DBColumn("last_name", DbType.String, false)]
public string LastName
{
get
{
return _lastName;
}
set
{
_lastName = value;
}
}
///

/// the address of the student
///

[DBColumn("address", DbType.String, true)]
public string Address
{
get
{
return _address;
}
set
{
_address = value;
}
}
///

/// the number of courses the student is enrolled in
///

[DBColumn("num_courses", DbType.Int32, true)]
public int NumberOfCourses
{
get
{
return _numCourses;
}
set
{
_numCourses = value;
}
}
}

In the code above, we provide meta-data that indicates: 1) the table name that the Student class should persist rows to (Student in this example), 2) the attributes that indicate a unique row (there is only one key field called StudentID), and 3) the column names that the properties should map to (student_id, first_name, last_name, and address, respectively).

Let's look at some code that uses this metadata (i.e. the custom attributes) in a meaningful way. In the next sections we will write C# code using .NET reflection to generate SQL statements for a particular object.

The class generating these SQL statements will be called SqlGenerator. We will also design an SqlObjectManager class that exposes a simple interface for managing objects in a SQL server database. The class diagram for these two classes is shown below:


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