SharePoint Entity Framework is an open source class library used for converting between SharePoint List Item and custom entity class (Project homepage: http://spentity.codeplex.com). Using SharePoint Entity Framework, you can read the field values from SharePoint List Item to corresponding properties of entity, or write the property values of entity to the corresponding Fields of SharePoint List Item. All you need is write a simple entity class. And in most cases, you don’t need to care about the conversion logic. SharePoint Entity Framework can greatly improve your coding productivity, and make your code more robust.

Supported Types

SharePoint Entity Framework supports most SharePoint built-in Field types and their corresponding CLR types. Following table lists all the supported types:

Base class

SharePoint Entity Framework requires entity class must derive from the base class Entity(located in WindStyle.SPEntity namespace).

Following table lists the default properties provided by Entity class:

Following table lists the default methods provided by Entity class:

Writing a simple entity class

Let’s write a simple entity class:

using WindStyle.SPEntity;

using WindStyle.SPEntity.Attributes;

public class SampleEntity : Entity

{

    [Field("Field1")]

    public int Property1 { get; set; }
    [Field("Field2")]

    public string Property2 { get; set; }

}

SampleEntity class contains two properties: Property1 and Property2. Both of them decorated by FieldAttribute. When converting, SharePoint Entity Framework will find the corresponding field in the list item by the internal name of the field specified in FieldAttribute.

Conversion

Following code snippet shows how to read a SharePoint List Item to an entity:

SPListItem item = DoSomethingToGetListItem();

Sample entity = new SampleEntity();

entity.Read(item)

After the property updated, we can call the Write method of the entity if we need to write it back to SharePoint List Item. As following code snippet shows:

entity.Property1++;

entity.Write(item);

item.Update();

Bulk conversion

SharePoint developers are very familiar with SPListItemCollection, SharePoint Entity Framework provide a Utilities class with two method to help us converting a SPListItemCollection object to an entity collection:

Both of above methods are implemented as extension method for facilitating invoking. Following code shows how to use them:

SPListItemCollection items = DoSomethingToGetListItems();

SampleEntity[] entities = items.AsEnumerable().Convert<SampleEntity>().ToArray();

SharePoint Entity Framework is designed to help developers quickly converting between SharePoint List Item and entity class. Therefore, It provides supports for most common types and makes the API as simple and friendly as possible.

For simple scenarios,  the code you need to write may not much more than above code snippets. SharePoint Entity Framework also provides the extension mechanisms to support the complex scenarios, please read the follow-up articles.