Feature suggestion

Hi there !

Finally i found an ORM for .NET that does not lack in one area or another.
I am talking of course about Lightspeed.

 However some problems remain:

+ Currently the Designer surface is quite buggy.
+ The schema generation from the Designer is also not quite complete it seems ( e.g even simple schemas
   don't work for MySQL due to missing columns etc )
+ Will there be a programmatic way to generate a schema ( maybe write out the appropriate change script ) ?
   which is quite important for installing an application at a customer site.
+ Will there be support for dealing with binary data ( image,blob etc ) ?
+ Currently string fields are created as VarChar(10) on MySQL ... will there be Designer support to change that ?

 Thanks for any light you can shed on those things !

Hi Gluber,

Thanks for the feedback.

We're sorry you've run into bugs in the designer.  Please let us know what you have found and how to reproduce the bugs because we would like to get them fixed!

Similarly, we'd like to know where you're seeing missing columns in schema generation.  We're aware of a couple of limitations when generating a database schema from a LightSpeed model, but it shouldn't be leaving out entire columns (unless it can't create them due to e.g. nullability issues, but in that case it should be telling you).  The other direction (generating a LightSpeed model from a database) should be pretty comprehensive.

Generating change scripts (or otherwise programmatically creating the schema) is definitely on the roadmap.  The currently "click to update" behaviour is aimed at rapid prototyping and we recognise that proper migrations are required for production sites.  However we don't have a target date for this yet.

Binary data (blob, image, varbinary, etc.) is supported in LightSpeed, and surfaced as byte arrays (the Blob type in the designer, the byte[] type in C#).  To interpret that data, for example as a bitmap, we'd recommend adding a property of the appropriate type in your half of the partial class, and backing the implementation onto the "raw" blob property.  For example:

// assume raw property is byte[] PhotoData
// ignoring error checking, and not tested!

public Bitmap Photo
{
  get { return Bitmap.FromFile(this.PhotoData); }
  set
  {
    using (MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream())
    {
      value.Save(ms, ImageFormat.Png);
      this.PhotoData = ms.GetBuffer();
    }
}

We don't build this in because there are a whole raft of things people might want to do with binary data and it's impractical for us to try to anticipate all of them. 

You can specify the length of a varchar field by adding a LengthValidation to the property in the designer.  (You can do this by right-clicking the property in the LightSpeed Model Explorer window, or by typing an expression such as <= 50 into the ValidateLength property in the properties window.)  We have a feature request logged to allow a default other than 10 if no length validation is specified.