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Data Access has been discontinued. Please refer to this page for more information.

Telerik® Data Access Metadata - 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.

Metadata - Overview

The first question you may ask yourself is "What is metadata?". In brief, metadata is data about data. It describes how the objects and relations in Telerik Data Access are named, typed and structured. How can it be useful? Well, you can think of a number of cases where it can be very handy to have access to the Telerik Data Access metadata:

  • Collecting statistics about your domain model - how many persistent classes, properties, keys, relations, etc.
  • Building dynamic user interface for dynamic data.
  • Validating your domain model.
  • Writing your own Telerik Data Access code generation tools.
  • Building and executing dynamic queries with LINQ to Metadata Model.

Telerik Data Access Metadata

Telerik Data Access metadata model provides both the infrastructure and type hierarchy that are used to describe the Persistent Model in Telerik Data Access. Via this metadata Telerik Data Access exposes several important concepts:

  • Conceptual objects.
  • Underlying relational artifacts - database tables, views or stored procedures.
  • The mapping information from persistent classes to the underlying relational model is also exposed through the Telerik Data Access metadata model.

All services used to manage the metadata, as well as the types that represents concepts used inside the metadata model are included in the Telerik.OpenAccess.Metadata namespace from the Telerik.OpenAccess.dll assembly.

In this section: