EF4.x and WCF Service (Persistence ignorant) Updating nested entities with 1 to n and m to n relationship.

Question

I have SQL Server database and would like to use LINQ to Entities and wrap it with WCF layer and expose it to client. (typical N-Tier architecture). ALso would like to have Persistence ignorant option and also would like to have an option ignore certain fields (sensitive information) in database from serializing it to client.

So what would be best approach for using Entity Framework with Persistence Ignorance, Self Tracking with WCF Support. I could find T4 template with either Self Tracking or Persistence Ignorant.. But everything bundled as single package.

Any help in this would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

STEs don't allow any projections - you must expose your entities in their exact form. If you want to hide some fields you must abandon STEs and create your own DTOs (data transfer objects) exposing only subset of your entities data. Once you use DTOs you must manually handle all change tracking.