Artificial Types - Overview

This article is relevant to entity models that utilize the deprecated Visual Studio integration of Telerik Data Access. The current documentation of the Data Access framework is available here.

The idea behind the artificial fields and types feature of Telerik Data Access is to enable developers to create and/or extend their persistent model during runtime. Telerik Data Access gives you the opportunity to add fields to the existing compiled persistent classes or adding new persistent classes without recompiling the project. The artificial fields and types can be done dynamically depending on the application's business logic.

Under the hood, Telerik Data Access takes care of transforming these entities into meaningful Type or Property Descriptors and gives you the opportunity to operate on such fields and do all CRUD operations that are doable using the compiled persistent classes and the standard API.

The above relates to the in-memory representation of the entities inside Telerik Data Access. The relational representation of those fields is the same as with the usual persistent-capable classes. It is doable by invoking a clever mechanism that uses the runtime schema changes API and the forward mapping capabilities of Telerik Data Access.

This section contains the following topics that discuss the Artificial Types/Fields feature of Telerik Data Access:

• Mapping Artificial Types
• Mapping Artificial Properties
• Defining Indexes
• Mixing CLR Types and Artificial Properties
• CRUD Operatiors
• Artificial Associations