Entity Framework Effort Data Loaders

Description

Data loaders are useful components in the Effort library that were designed to help set up the initial state of a fake database.

Types

Effort provides multiple built-in data loaders:

• EntityDataLoader
• CsvDataLoader
• CacheDataLoader

They are really easy to use, all the developer has to do is to create a data loader instance and pass it to the chosen Effort factory method.

EntityDataLoader

EntityDataLoader can fetch data from an existing database by utilizing an existing Entity Framework compatible ADO.NET provider. It is initialized with an entity connection string.

var dataLoader = new EntityDataLoader("name=MyEntities");

CsvDataLoader

The purpose of CsvDataLoader is to read data records from CSV files. It is initialized with a path that points to a folder containing the CSV files. Each file represents the content of a database table.

var dataLoader = new CsvDataLoader(@"C:\path\to\files");

There is also a tool that helps the developers to export the data from an existing database into appropriately formatted CSV files.

CacheDataLoader

The CachingDataLoader was designed to speed up the initialization process by wrapping any data loader with a cache layer.

• If the wrapped data loader is specified with a specific configuration the first time, the CachingDataLoader will pull the required data from the wrapped data loader.
• As a side effect, this data is going to be cached in the memory.
• If the CachingDataLoader was initialized to wrap the same kind of data loader with the same configuration again, then the data will be retrieved from the previously create a cache, the wrapped data loader will not be utilized.

var wrappedDataLoader = new CsvDataLoader(@"C:\path\to\files");
 
var dataLoader = new CachingDataLoader(wrappedDataLoader, false);

Hint:

Each data loader can be used in different scenarios. We suggest using EntityDataLoader during interactive testing, while CachingDataLoader and CsvDataLoader combined can be really useful if they are utilized in automated tests.