ASP.NET MVC: Best Way To Call Stored Procedure - asp.net-mvc

Question

I'm trying to decide which is the best way to call a stored procedure.
I'm new to ASP.NET MVC and I've been reading a lot about Linq to SQL and Entity Framework, as well as the Repository Pattern. To be honest, I'm having a hard time understanding the real differences between L2S and EF... but I want to make sure that what I'm building within my application is right.
For right now, I need to properly call stored procedures to: a) save some user information and get a response and, b) grab some inforation for a catalog of products.
So far, I've created a Linq to SQL .dbml file, selected the sotred procedure from the Server Explorer and dragged that instance into the .dbml. I'm currently calling the Stored Procedure like so:
MyLinqModel _db = new MyLinqModel();
_db.MyStoredProcedure(args);
I know there's got to be more involved... plus I'm doing this within my controller, which I understand to be not a good practice.
Can someone recognize what my issues are here?

Answer 1

LINQ and EF are probably overkill if all you're trying to do is call a stored proc.
I use Enterprise Library, but ADO.NET will also work fine.
See this tutorial.
Briefly (shamelessly copied-and-pasted from the referenced article):
SqlConnection conn = null;
SqlDataReader rdr = null;
// typically obtained from user
// input, but we take a short cut
string custId = "FURIB";
Console.WriteLine("\nCustomer Order History:\n");
// create and open a connection object
conn = new SqlConnection("Server=(local);DataBase=Northwind; Integrated Security=SSPI");
conn.Open();
// 1. create a command object identifying
// the stored procedure
SqlCommand cmd = new SqlCommand(
"CustOrderHist", conn);
// 2. set the command object so it knows
// to execute a stored procedure
cmd.CommandType = CommandType.StoredProcedure;
// 3. add parameter to command, which
// will be passed to the stored procedure
cmd.Parameters.Add(
new SqlParameter("#CustomerID", custId));
// execute the command
rdr = cmd.ExecuteReader();
// iterate through results, printing each to console
while (rdr.Read())
{
Console.WriteLine(
"Product: {0,-35} Total: {1,2}",
rdr["ProductName"],
rdr["Total"]);
}
}
Update
I missed the part where you said that you were doing this in your controller.
No, that's not the right way to do this.
Your controller should really only be involved with orchestrating view construction. Create a separate class library, called "Data Access Layer" or something less generic, and create a class that handles calling your stored procs, creating objects from the results, etc. There are many opinions on how this should be handled, but perhaps the most common is:
View
|
Controller
|
Business Logic
|
Data Access Layer
|--- SQL (Stored procs)
-Tables
-Views
-etc.
|--- Alternate data sources
-Web services
-Text/XML files
-blah blah blah.
MSDN has a decent tutorial on the topic.

Answer 2

Try this:
Read:
var authors = context.Database.SqlQuery<Author>("usp_GetAuthorByName #AuthorName",
new SqlParameter("#AuthorName", "author"));
Update:
var affectedRows = context.Database.ExecuteSqlCommand
("usp_CreateAuthor #AuthorName = {0}, #Email= {1}",
"author", "email");
From this link: http://www.dotnetthoughts.net/how-to-execute-a-stored-procedure-with-entity-framework-code-first/
And I would go with the framework David Lively mentioned, instead of having the routines in the controller. Simply pass the results back as IEnumerable<blah> from a function in a separate repository class for an edit, pass a boolean back for if the update succeeded for an update.

Answer 3

LINQ to SQL and ADO.NET EF attach read stored procs to the data/object context class that you use to go against its various entities. For create, update, and delete, you can create a proc that maps the properties of an entity that the model generates, and using the entity mapping window (forget the exact name right now), you can map an entities fields with the proc parameters. So, say you have a Customers table, EF generates a Customers Entity, and you can map the proc parameters to the properties of the Customer entity when attempting to update/insert/delete.
Now, you can map a CUD proc to a function, but I don't know all the repercussions; I like the way I just mentioned the best.
HTH.

Answer 4

I common pattern is to pass a repository interface into your controller by dependency injection. The choice of what persistence/orm technology you use is really another issue and unrelated to the fact that you are using MVC. Using the repository pattern and coding to abstractions (interfaces) makes your application easy to test by mocking out your repositories.
I think you should also try to use as few stored procedures as possible. This means you can more easily test your logic in isolation (unit tests) without needing to be connected to a database. I would highly recommend looking at NHibernate. The learning curve is fairly steep but you are in full control of your mappings and configuration. There are obviously occasions where you will need stored procs for performance reasons, but using an ORM predominantly is very beneficial.

Answer 5

I can't imagine that your goal is to be able to call a stored procedure. To me it sounds as if you need to forget stored procedures and use Linq to Sql. I say L2S because EF is far more to learn, and not needed in this case.