Generation of Entity Framework classes from a WSDL

Question

Good morning,

I am taking over from someone who has been using the Entity Framework to communicate with a database. How this has appears to have been done is that there is a WSDL that describes all of the objects that we use created in Enterprise Architect. This is then imported as a Service Reference in Visual Studio.

I am a bit confused by this so was wondering if it is a sensible approach. The WSDL has a sample port, binding and service that appears to be not used at all in the code. Do these exist in order that the WSDL gets imported properly?

I looked on Google and couldn't see any examples of people creating from WSDLs in this way so wasn't sure it was a common approach.

So when this is done you have the representations of the data as classes. Then it seems you add them to a class inheriting from a DbContext which creates the tables in the database. Is this correct?

Answer 1

If you are using WSDL just to get data from EA to VS it is of course completely wrong. WSDL describes web service - port and binding are mandatory for service description.

EA Professional edition and above has direct support for code generation from the model. You just have to set which language you want to use (in Project browser select folder containing your classes and interfaces and set language in properties) and then you can use Tools > Source Code Engineering > Generate Package Source Code.