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POCode re-use with Linq-to-Sql - Creating 'generic' look-up tables
 

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    <p>I'm working on an application at the moment in ASP.NET MVC which has a number of look-up tables, all of the form</p> <pre><code>LookUp { Id Text } </code></pre> <p>As you can see, this just maps the Id to a textual value. These are used for things such as Colours. I now have a number of these, currently 6 and probably soon to be more.</p> <p>I'm trying to put together an API that can be used via AJAX to allow the user to add/list/remove values from these lookup tables, so for example I could have something like:</p> <p><a href="http://example.com/Attributes/Colours/[List/Add/Delete]" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://example.com/Attributes/Colours/[List/Add/Delete]</a></p> <p>My current problem is that clearly, regardless of which lookup table I'm using, <em>everything</em> else happens exactly the same. So really there should be no repetition of code whatsoever.</p> <p>I currently have a custom route which points to an 'AttributeController', which figures out the attribute/look-up table in question based upon the URL (ie <a href="http://example.com/Attributes/Colours/List" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://example.com/Attributes/Colours/List</a> would want the 'Colours' table). I pass the attribute (Colours - a string) and the operation (List/Add/Delete), as well as any other parameters required (say "Red" if I want to add red to the list) back to my repository where the actual work is performed.</p> <p>Things start getting messy here, as at the moment I've resorted to doing a switch/case on the attribute string, which can then grab the Linq-to-Sql entity corresponding to the particular lookup table. I find this pretty dirty though as I find myself having to write the same operations on each of the look-up entities, ugh!</p> <p>What I'd really like to do is have some sort of mapping, which I could simply pass in the attribute name and get out some form of generic lookup object, which I could perform the desired operations on without having to care about type.</p> <p>Is there some way to do this to my Linq-To-Sql entities? I've tried making them implement a basic interface (IAttribute), which simply specifies the Id/Text properties, however doing things like this fails:</p> <pre><code>System.Data.Linq.Table&lt;IAttribute&gt; table = GetAttribute("Colours"); </code></pre> <p>As I cannot convert <code>System.Data.Linq.Table&lt;Colour&gt;</code> to <code>System.Data.Linq.Table&lt;IAttribute&gt;</code>.</p> <p>Is there a way to make these look-up tables 'generic'?</p> <p>Apologies that this is a bit of a brain-dump. There's surely imformation missing here, so just let me know if you'd like any further details. Cheers!</p>
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