COMPLETE Line of Business Application - PRISM MEF Entity Framework - Examples?

Question

Are there any examples/tutorials/information on more advanced line of business applications? There is a great deal of information on understanding PRISM, MEF, MVVM, Entity Framework, generic repositories, mechanics behind prism and other MVVM frameworks such as regions, navigation etc.

I know how to connect to a database and switch views and create a basic application.

so at this point I have a DataGrid with a list of my database objects in it. Lets say at this point I even have templates and it all looks good to view.

How do you implement the last part of this to perform CRUD operations. Is it better to edit directly in the DataGrid and have update/add/remove buttons? Should it update on row change? What if I want a custom modal view to show to edit/add data? What is the best practice for the actual manipulation of data?

Are there any examples of a PRISM/MVVM/Entity Framework application that you can run and actually view/edit/delete records in a database?

All the examples I have found do not elaborate on how/why you should implement the final data implementation.

Quote from another answer in a similar question:

Samples included with PRISM cover all you need. Also, PRISM is about UI composition, data access is out of scope.

My question is about how to get data access working with PRISM, modal view, edit directly in grid etc.

The samples do not cover all I need, if one sample had a window that listed data in a database and provided CRUD functions then this would be true. Is there any samples that show how all of this works together?

Answer 1

Having done something similar in the past, I would create a data service whose only job is to facilitate data requests to/from the database and the user.

The data service is the only piece that actually knows how to talk to the db and those details should be obfuscated from the consumers (your viewmodels, etc.).

Once the data service is created, the service would hold onto the editable collection of tuples, handle modifications to any and all of them, and expose them directly for binding to the View, ideally through the ICollectionView interface.

Then, it's just a matter of injecting that service into your vm's (ideally through an interface to keep things unit testable).

I know these concepts are all high-level, but that's kind of all I can give you at this point. This is a project I wrote a while back to showcase MVVM and it has this idea in place, although the data store is not a database (but that isn't limited by the concept of a data service). Feel free to dig around in the source code of the project and hopefully you'll find something useful there.