Changing the Designer Defaults

When you create an entity in ‘model first’ style – that is, by dragging an Entity icon from the toolbox – LightSpeed provides defaults for its various settings.  You can change the defaults for newly created entities by specifying a defaults policy.

To do this, open the LightSpeed Model Explorer, right-click the root model node, and choose Add New Defaults Policy.  You can then edit the defaults through the Policies folder.

You can change the defaults for:

·         Identity type.  The Identity Type for newly created entities.

·         Storage options.  The Track Create Time, Track Update Time, Soft Delete and Optimistic Concurrency Checking options for newly created entities.

·         Base class.  The base class for newly created entities.  Model-wide base classes are usually there to provide a few common fields or services, so this defaults to concrete table inheritance

·         New in LightSpeed 5, defaults can also be specified for generating association DataMember attributes.

The defaults policy affects only newly created entities, not existing entities.  If you create an entity by dragging a table from Server Explorer, LightSpeed uses the table definition to infer the identity type and storage options, ignoring the defaults policy, though the base class is still respected.