Chic

Lightweight, intuitive and performant Data Layer (Repositories, Change Tracking) that sits on top of Dapper.

Labs Notice - This is a Cedita Labs project, and is offered unsupported. We encourage external contributions.

Roadmap

• Support for ASP.NET Identity
• High performance tree insertions
• Dynamic Query Building (Similar to IQueryable interface, but with less hell)
• Set / Configuration Support for Entities
• Dynamic Update / Select building

Get Started

Chic is available as a Prerelease package from NuGet.

Install-Package Chic -pre

Configuration w/ ASP.NET Core

The easiest way to use Chic is through Dependency Injection. With ASP.NET Core, the configuration is quite simple to wire up your repositories for usage.

public void ConfigureServices(IServiceCollection services)
{
    // ..
    
    // Database Connection
    services.AddTransient<IDbConnection>(db => new SqlConnection(Configuration.GetConnectionString("Default")));
    // Chic Generic Repositories
    services.AddScoped(typeof(Chic.Abstractions.IRepository<>), typeof(Chic.Repository<>));
    
    // ..
}

Your First Model

Chic currently supports entities that have a Key property (of any type - but the below example uses the int key method).

Important: IKeyedEntity was previously required. This is now deprecated, as Chic will automatically discover the Primary Key field based on convention (Id, or {ClassName}Id).

public class DemoModel 
{
    public int Id { get; set; }
    public string Name { get; set; }
    public bool IsEpic { get; set; }
}

Using your first Auto Repository

By registering our abstraction for IRepository<> we can use it with any IKeyedEntity automatically. As an example service below, we simply inject our IRepository<DemoModel> and have access to the database directly.

public class DataService
{
    private readonly IRepository<DemoModel> demoModelRepository;
    public DataService(IRepository<DemoModel> demoModelRepository)
    {
        this.demoModelRepository = demoModelRepository;
    }
    
    public Task AddDemo()
    {
        await demoModeRepository.InsertAsync(new DemoModel { Name = "Hello World", IsEpic = true });
    }
}

Querying with WHERE

Your repository provides basic extensions for querying your single table with a WHERE.

var epicDemoModels = await demoModelRepository.GetByWhereAsync("IsEpic = 1");

Performance Considerations

The driving force behind Chic is to enable performant applications without exerting unnecessary effort to implementation detail of said performance.

Under the hood we use Dapper for object mapping, which incurs a hit on first use of mapping for each type used. This can not be pre-warmed.

Chic's internals use Expressions (rather than Reflection) for accessing properties on objects. On creation of a repository, Chic incurs a hit to generate a type map that is then stored in memory. This too has no direct support for pre-warmup, however can be simulated by creating an instance of each repository type you intend to use at startup.

Bulk Insertions

Chic supports SqlBulkCopy for mass data insertion. Instead of looping on an InsertAsync() call, InsertManyAsync() should be used instead.

Updates

In a future version of Chic, you will be able to specify columns to update on a model either automatically through change tracking, or by manually specifying which columns to update. This will internally affect the query generation used in UPDATE statements.