Classes from SQL-Server for C# and VB.NET

Code presented provides a developer with a tool to generate classes from a database.

An alternate is to install the following Visual Studio extension which requires a developer to open SQL-Server Management Studio (SSMS), select a table, right click and select CREATE To Clipboard and repeat for each table.

While the code in this repository allow a developer to create classes for an entire database at the click of a button and places these classes in a folder, ready to use but recommend adding your namespace to each class.

Supports VB.NET and C# (written in C#)

Code presented here provide methods to create concrete classes from SQL-Server database tables written with Microsoft Visual Studio 2019, C#, .NET Core 5.

When use of conventional DataSet/DataTable to store data are too heavy, similarly Entity Framework is overkill creating simple classes can be a great solution.

When there are a handful of columns in a database table it's easy to hand code a class with properties to store data while a table with many columns may be cumbersome to write by hand.

Within this repository is a Windows Form project which creates concrete classes for a select database.

How to use

In the form load event in the project CreateClassesFromSqlServer change the server name if not using SQL-Express edition of SQL-Server to your server name.

DataOperations.Server = ".\\SQLEXPRESS";

Set the project CreateClassesFromSqlServer as the startup project
Build the project CreateClassesFromSqlServer
Start the project
Select a database in the listbox
Click Run/Create button

Once clicking the Run/Create button a folder is created under the application folder named Classes, the classes are create under Classes\DatabaseNamme.

Example

Copy all or required classes to your project and add a namespace if so desired.

Originally written to answer a stackoverflow question to Declarate each property with a specific property attribute using a select statement found in ClassQuery.txt. Have changed to the code to exclude the property attribute using a query in ClassQueryPlain.txt

No guarantees that the code fits all situations

Test project

The project DataLibraryTestProject uses one of the classes generated with the addition of editing the class and adding a namespace.

Requires

Visual Studio 2019 or higher
NuGet package System.Data.SqlClient

Important

In some cases the type for a property may not be known and in these cases will have UNKNOWN prepended to the SQL-Server type. In these cases a conversion will be needed.

For example [hierarchyid] needs to be parses using SqlHierarchyId.Parse via a read-only property.

Note