ODS Design Studio

A highly productive, easy to use DAL development environment

What is ODS Design Studio?

ODS Design Studio is a highly productive development environment created purely to design and generate the source code for an entire Data Access Layer. ODS Design Studio does not require existing databases or assemblies and does not rely on external design tools such as SQL Enterprise Manager. ODS Design Studio allows you to design the objects that you want to store in a database. ODS automatically designs the database for you so you don't need to be a database expert.

Class designer

The class designer allows you to quickly and easily create and edit classes for the objects you want to store in a database. You can define the class properties and methods and also predefine objects.

Properties

ODS currently supports the following property types (.NET equivalent in brackets): Small Integer (Int16), Integer (Int32), Big Integer, (Int64), DateTime, String, Single Float (float), Double Float (double), Boolean, Object and Enum. Object and enum properties reference other ODS classes or enums.

Methods

ODS can generate the classic "Add", "Update", "Delete" data access methods for each class. These methods allow objects to be stored, updated, deleted or retrieved from a database without writing a single line of code or SQL. You can also add "User Methods" by providing your own SQL. ODS automatically wraps the SQL in a Stored Procedure for you and includes it in the DAL.

Enum Designer

ODS supports enums. These are implemented both as enums in the source code and as foreign key tables in the database. The enum designer allows you to create, edit and delete enums and enum values. Once defined, enums can be used as class properties.

Source Code Generation

Source code can be generated directly from ODS Design Studio. It's as simple and easy as clicking a button. ODS Design Studio provides many options in the way that source code is generated including generating upgrade code between builds and/or versions (see Automatic Versioning).

Solution Properties

Virtually all the configuration options for ODS Design Studio are stored at the solution level which means that different solutions can have different configurations. There are a huge number of configurable options. Some settings have two versions, global and local to make working in a team environment easier. Local settings are stored separately from other settings so that individual team members can have different settings.