#servicestack-ormlite

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Sort POCOs for Table Creation

If you are using a Code First approach to generate database tables, you may need to order the tables to avoid violating foreign key constraints.

The gist below shows how to use QuickGraph to sort your table definitions that are decorated with ServiceStack.OrmLite's ForeignKey attribute. 

Bear in mind that database schemas change over time. So, consider using code-first generation to verify database migrations.

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Object Serialization as Step Towards Normalization

ServiceStack.OrmLite refers to this as a "text blob" and it is by default how it handles complex data inside a table POCO. So, this is a trivial way to proceed with new data.

For example, we may have a database of food products and now we will be ingesting "Nutrition Facts" per item. Inserting a record as follows:

db.Insert( new FoodItem { Name = "Oatmeal", NutritionFacts = new NutritionFacts { ServingSize = 1, ServingSizeUnits = "cup", Calories = 158, TotalFat = 3.2m } });

Would yield a record with NutritionFacts serialized as compact JSON.

If, in the future, we need to query data we can use a database migration to transform it to a more normalized format. In some cases the POCO may not change much. We can take advantage of ServiceStack.OrmLite's [References] and [ForeignKey] relational attributes to read entities from the more normalized database.