BlueFinity International has announced the latest enhancement to its .NET development toolset for MultiValue databases, mv.NET with Solution Objects. mv.NET provides a 100% native .NET interface to all major MultiValue databases, allowing .NET developers to access all aspects of their MultiValue systems. The new Solution Objects component set for mv.NET builds upon this existing infrastructure to provide strongly-typed, class-based access to MultiValue databases via the generation of an advanced data abstraction layer.
Solution Objects adds extra design-time functionality to the existing mv.NET Data Manager utility, including an entity designer, a data mapping tool and a code generator. The generated code then utilizes new run-time support libraries to provide full data persistence support for .NET applications.
The design-time tools allow the developer to define how their MultiValue data structures map to a class-based representation of the application's data domain. The code generator takes these entity definitions and generates both Data Access Layer (DAL) and (multiple) Business Access Layer (BAL) code modules in either C# or VB.NET.
The DAL holds a complete definition of the entity-to-database mapping scheme. The developer is able to define the existence and content of application "entities" using existing dictionary definitions as a starting point if required. The entity modeling tool allows the developer to define many advanced pieces of data shape and relationship information and is fully nested-data (multi/subvalue) aware.
Each Business Access Layer (BAL) exposes a sub-set of the data access supported by the underlying DAL. The purpose of the BAL is to provide customized "views" of the same underlying entities in order to impose a simplified or tighter level of security layer for different groups of developers, allowing greater control over data exposure and manipulation.
The Data Manager's code generator automatically adds all required interface implementation and class decoration code into the generated BAL in order to support standard .NET data binding for both web and rich-client applications. This also means that all classes within a BAL can be used as a standard Visual Studio object data source providing any third party .NET tool or component with full read/write access to the underlying MultiValue database. Code generated by the Data Manager also includes XML-based on-line Intellisense help.
Within Solution Objects, support for multiple data sources within a single BAL will be added. This will allow access to a variety of different back-end data stores (including SQL databases) to be consolidated into a single access layer.
"Solution Objects will revolutionize the way in which you access and manipulate your MultiValued data from within Visual Studio," says David Cooper, lead developer at BlueFinity International. "It provides easy to use database access for developers who don't have detailed knowledge of MultiValue database technology or even databases in general. Also, it encourages developers to produce more intuitive, readable code resulting in much faster, more effective application development. With .NET set to dominate the application development space, mv.NET with Solution Objects sets a new benchmark for mainstream developer usage of MultiValue databases."
The general release of mv.NET with Solution Objects is available now. For more information or to register for a free webinar, go here.