The CodeFluent Entities Blog

Using CodeFluent Entities you can define attributes on other concepts such as Entities, Methods or Properties and what gets really interesting is that the .NET Business Object Model Producer translates those CodeFluent Entities Attributes into actual .NET attributes

Now say you want to specify some specific attributes on your generated .NET classes or data annotations on your properties, defining attributes in your model would be the way to go!

To do so select your concept such as a property and click on “Add Attribute” in the ribbon, the following dialog will show up:

In the attribute name set the full type name of your attribute such as “System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations.RequiredAttribute”.

Note: Setting the attribute class using the drop down list in the lower part of the form allows you to specify where this attribute should be placed in the generated classes. Default is in the entity class, but you can also place it in the service class, the service interface, or the proxy class.

In the screenshot below we defined a Required data annotation attribute on the Name property of our entity:

Then here’s the output after generating our model over:

[System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations.RequiredAttribute()]
[System.ComponentModel.DefaultValueAttribute(default(string))]
[System.Xml.Serialization.XmlElementAttribute(IsNullable=true, Type=typeof(string))]
public string Name
{
    (…)

To specify a parameter to your attribute, go back to your model, select your attribute and click on the Arguments property in the property grid:

And let’s add an error message to our required attribute:

Generate over and here’s the result:

[System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations.RequiredAttribute(ErrorMessage="Name is required")]
[System.ComponentModel.DefaultValueAttribute(default(string))]
[System.Xml.Serialization.XmlElementAttribute(IsNullable=true, Type=typeof(string))]
public string Name
{
    (…)

Carl Anderson