The Beef.Database.Core tool is a console application provided to automate the management of a relational database as part of the end-to-end development process.
The primary/core capabilities are enabled by DbEx; see documentation for details.
Depending on the underlying database provider specific capabilities are enabled; see:
The MigrationConsoleBase<TSelf> extends the DbEx capabilities enabling additional code-generation phase (see OnRamp) that is used to generate either Beef-enabled database or C# code depending on the underlying database provider and/or configuration.
The respective code-generation Templates are housed as embedded resources within the respective project's Templates folder.
The database code-generation supports a yaml sub-command that will generate the basic entity code-generation YAML configuration by inferring the database configuration for the specified tables into a temporary temp.entity.beef-5.yaml file. Additionally, an initial C# validator will also be generated for each table.
The developer is then responsible for the copy+paste of the required yaml into the entity.beef-5.yaml and refdata.beef-5.yaml file(s) and further amending as appropriate. After use, the developer should remove the temp.entity.beef-5.yaml file as it is otherwise not referenced by the code-generation.
This by no means endorses the direct mapping between entity and database model as the developer is still encouraged to reshape the entity to take advantage of object-orientation and resulting JSON capabilities.
The following provides the help content for the yaml sub-command:
codegen yaml <Schema> <Table> [<Table>...] Creates a temporary Beef entity YAML file for the specified table(s).
- A table name with a prefix ! denotes that no CRUD operations are required.
- A table name with a prefix * denotes that a 'GetByArgs' operation is required.
An example is as follows:
dotnet run codegen yaml Hr Gender *Employee !EmergencyContact TerminationReason