CodeSmith NetTiers Best Practices

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After using NetTiers for a couple of weeks now, here are some suggestions for usage:

1) Use NetTiers like any third party library. Build it and include the libraries. Do not alter code inside generated libraries unless mission critical. I also use the Microsoft.Patterns library. They ship the code but I don't alter it, I just use the built libraries. 

2) Prefix the library namespace with NetTiers so that the generated libraries look like NetTiers.Entities, NetTiers.Data, etc.

3) If you use NetTiers to generate your CRUD, set the ProcedurePrefix value to NetTiers_. When you are looking through a million procs, it easier to pass a whole section based on alphabetical sorting. If you use AspNet Membership, you will be accustomed to this naming schema as those procs are prefixed with aspnet_

4) If you create your own procs, prefix those procs to something that you won't confuse with any other library's procs, such as 'cust' for custom. Of cource, IncludeCustoms is set to true and CustomProcedureStartsWith should be set to 'cust_{0}_' so that a table name of Profile should have a custom proc of cust_Profile_SelectAll.

5) While still getting your template settings figured out:

  • Don't set ExecuteSQL to true until you have tested your generated SQL and looked through what was created.
  • Set LaunchVisualStudio to true and save yourself a few clicks.
  • Set ViewReport to false. You don't need another browser to open while you are still figuring out your templates.

6) Build the Web Service and the Admin site. Even if you don't plan to use AJAX or you have your own admin pages already built, these are just more examples of NetTiers code usage. Then when you need a data backdoor or quick AJAX, you are that much closer.

7) NetTiers documentation suggests using DeepLoad to get to a related table via FK. I can see how this would be used in their example of list of Orders in a grid and you also want to display the Customer's Name in the grid. What if you had a table of ProfileItems and a table of UserProfileItems and you wanted a list of all the ProfileItems in a grid with this user's settings? With the NetTiers usual get based on FK from either table, you won't get the grid I want (right?). So in that case, I'll create a custom proc with the proper bind.

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