Thursday, July 14, 2011

Entity-Framework Differed loading (Lazy Loading) and immediate (Eager ) loading

You can use entity framework with lazy loading enabled to do everything . But when you try to do the performance testing you will find some crazy things going on inside. You can use SQL Server Profiler or a tool such as Entity Framework Profiler to see whats happening inside. By looking at SQL queries exacuting to ther server you can understand where to use Lazy loading or Immediate loading.
1.Lazy loading
Related entities are automatically loaded from the data source when you access a navigation property. With this type of loading, be aware that each navigation property that you access results in a separate query executing against the data source if the entity is not already in the ObjectContext. Here is a lazy loading enabled example
db.Configuration.LazyLoadingEnabled = true;// enable lazy loading
var student = db.Students.FirstOrDefault(st => st.PersonID == 1);// first queri will execute here
int i=student.Enrollments.Count;// Second query will execute here to load selected students enrolments

It will execute two separate queries to the server. First is to get student's sealer properties and second query is to load his enrollments.

2.Immediate/Eager Loading
In this type only one single request will go to the database. It will return all entities defined by the path in a single result set. You can specify the related data that you want to load with the query by specifying paths.
db.Configuration.LazyLoadingEnabled = false;
var student = db.Students.Include("Enrollments").FirstOrDefault(st => st.PersonID == 1);
int i=student.Enrollments.Count;

this will execute one query to load student's scaler properties and his navigational property(Collection of Enrollments).

How to choose the best method
You need to consider three things,

  1. How many connections that you are going to make with the database. If you are using lazy loading there will be a database call for all the reference points of a navigation properties if referred navigation property is not in the context.
  2. How much data that you are going to retrieve from databaseIf you choose to load all the data in initial query with differed loading it will be too slow when you have huge amount of data to retrieve.
  3. Complexity of the query . When you are using lazy loading the queries will be simple because all the data is not loaded in the initial query. If you use immediate loading it will make quires will be more complex with query paths

Saturday, July 9, 2011

Jquery Post URL problems in IIS hosted Eenvironments

If you have used JQuery post with ASP.Net MVC the URL in the post will be something like
"YourControllerName/ActionName"
Example:-
$.post("Home/CreatePerson", { name: "John", time: "2pm" },
    function(data) {
    alert(data);
});
This will work great until you deploy your project in IIS with an alias to your web application. Let say the give alias is "MyWeb". The the URL will be -your-iis-server-ip/MyWeb. But the Jquery post in above will post its data to a URL something like -your-iis-server-ip/Home/CreatePerson

To avoid this you need to create post URL dynamically using @Url.Action() helper. Here is the corrected JQuery post.

$.post("@Url.Action("CreatePerson", "Home")", { name: "John", time: "2pm" },
    function(data) {
    alert(data);
});

Sunday, June 26, 2011

Ncover Installation in windows server 2008

Recently I was trying to install Ncover in Windows Server 2008. Even though I had installed .Net framework 4.0 Ncover setup threw an error saying that "you need to have .Net 3.5 or above to install NCover".I had re installed .Net Framework 4.0 several times ad restarted the server but no effect.
Then I went to the server manger panel and I saw a section called feature summery. In add features section you can add .Net framework 3.5 features. After a restart everything worked fine.