Dapper.Rainbow with existing database schema

Question

I am trying out Dapper. I like what I have seen so far. In order to do simple CRUD, I use Dapper.rainbow. It works very well. However, it works only if the table has identity column with name Id. It makes sense to have db like that but I can not ask for column name change in database just to use Dapper. To be more clear, I am working with database like Northwind Db. It has tablename repeated in Id column everywhere.

In order to handle this,I changed the Dapper.Rainbow code as below:

   public T Get(TId id,string idColumnName="Id")
        {
            return database.Query<T>("select * from " + TableName + " where               "+idColumnName+" = @id", new { id }).FirstOrDefault();
        }

Is there a better way to handle this such as Column mapping /annotations or something completely different?

I have read questions like these

Manually Map column names with class properties

Dapper.Rainbow VS Dapper.Contrib

( I came across similar little problem with Dapper.Contrib, I will ask it separately).

Update - Not sure if the answers are applicable to my Dapper.Rainbow problem here (Atleast, I don't see how).

Thanks for help in advance!

Answer 1

I had a similar problem. The existing Dapper extensions did not fit my ideal pattern. I wanted simple CRUD operations with smart defaults without anything extra. I also wanted to have models with additional properties that did not directly map to the database. For example - a FullName property that combines FirstName and LastName in its getter - and not add FullName to the Insert and Update statements.

I wanted the primary key column to be Id in most cases but allow overriding with an attribute.

Finally, I wanted the table name to match the class name by default but allow overriding with an attribute.

I ended up writing my own extension to Dapper that solves these issues. Its on Github and Nuget. Hopefully it will be helpful to you.

https://github.com/ericdc1/Dapper.SimpleCRUD