Sphere is an abstraction layer around data access code using a repository pattern. The purpuse of this library is mainly to add a thin layer on top of the data access code to allow you to exchange real and mock implementation and thus make testing a lot easier. Also, because is an abstraction, you could change or mix different methods to access data without to much impact in your application
Sphere has three main classes
- Repository : Interface defining all available methods
- ContextRepository : Repository implementation based on EntityFramework's DbContext
- FakeRepository : Mock repository using in-memory collection to store data temporarily
Aside from this classes theres a SphereConfig class which holds any configuration or customization you wish to add.
The repository implementations inherit from the context abstraction an implement their data access code as they see fit. If any configuration are needed, its added to the SphereConfig class.
To start using Sphere, you only need to configure the global DbContext instance in the static SphereConfig class. This allows the default constructor in ContextRepository to use this instance instead of passing a new one each time you want a new repository.
You can do this as follows
protected void Application_Start()
{
SphereConfig.GlobalContext = new SampleContext(); //Replace SampleContext with your DbContext instance
}The best place to put this is in the application entry point. In the previous example I used the Global.asax's Application_Start() impliying I'm using a wep application but this could easly be translated to the Main() method in a Dektop application.
Sphere is available as a nuget package. You can ad it to your project running the following command in your pagackage console
Install-Package Sphere.Core
You can also find Sphere's nuget page here : https://www.nuget.org/packages/Sphere.Core