Mapping select stored procedures in entity framework

Question

My scenario I\'m using Visual Studio 2010 with Entity Framework 4.1 I have a legacy database with many tables and many stored procedures. I\'m writing an ASP.NET C# program usin

Answer 1

It is not possible. You can import your stored procedures as function imports and manually execute them but you cannot replace queries generated by EF with custom stored procedures.

Answer 2

Except that you can, sort of.

Take your most basic select stored procedure (i.e., the one which is closest to "select * from mytable", and use it to define a view in your database. Have entity framework use this "myview" instead of "mytable". Then map your insert, update and delete stored procs for this view-based entity as you did originally for your table.

Finally, use function imports for your more selective selects, and define them to return collections of your entity. So if you had something like a Person entity, and you had a stored proc called something like FetchPersonByAge(int), your entity would end up with a static method called something like "GetByAge(int)". You could then call it in code like this: var people33 = Person.getByAge(33);

I have done this, and it worked quite well, allowing me to respect a legacy database's designers demand that all database access be through their stored procs, and no user code directly accessing tables. See Julie Lerman's article:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/data/gg699321.aspx

Dave