EfLight 🪶

Goal

EfLight's goal is to provide a simple API to use EF Core in order to avoid the boilerplate code required for most basic operations with EF Core.

It provides two base classes:

CrudRepository : which as its name implies, provides most basic operations for CRUD.
PagingAndSortingRepository: it extends CrudRepository and provides pagination features on top of existing features of CrudRepository.

Getting started

Suppose that we have an entity class named Student and our DbContext is already configured.


[Table("Student")]
class Student
{
    [Key]
    [DatabaseGenerated(DatabaseGeneratedOption.Identity)]
    public int Id { get; set; }
    public string? FirstName { get; set; }
    public string? LastName { get; set; }

    [DataType(DataType.Date)]
    public DateTime BirthDate { get; set; }
}

To interact with the table, just create a repository class which extends whether CrudRepository or PagingAndSortingRepository (the choice depends on your requirements) with its corresponding interface that will be injected in other classes.


public interface IStudentRepository : ICrudRepository<Student, int>
{

}


class StudentRepository : CrudRepository<Student, int>, IStudentRepository
{
    public StudentRepository(YourDbContext context) : base(context)
    {

    }
}

Then in Program.cs, you can register all of your repositories using:


builder.Services.AddEfLight<Program>();

Usage

All you have to do is to inject it where it is needed. For example:


public class StudentService
{
   private readonly IStudentRepository _repository;

   public StudentService(IStudentRepository repository)
   {
        _repository = repository;
   }

   public void CheckIfAllAboveAge(int age)
   {
       bool result =  _repository.ExistsWhere(x => x.BirthData.Year > age);

       // Your business logic
   }

   public Student? FindByName(string name)
   {
        Student? student;

        Optional<Student> result = _repository.FindWhere(x => x.LastName == name);

        // Throws the exception if the result is null
        student = result.OrElseThrow(() => new Exception());

        // Instead of throwing an exception, you can also do
        result.IfNullThen(() => {
            student = _repository.FindWhere(x => x.FirstName == name);
        });

        return student;
   }
}

Custom queries

You can also provide more features to your repository classes depending on your use cases. Just use an interface defining the contract and provide your own implementation of that use case.


public interface IStudentRepository : ICrudRepository<Student, int>
{
    void UpsertById(int studentId);
}

In the repository class, you'll have:


class StudentRepository : CrudRepository<Student, int>, IStudentRepository
{
    public StudentRepository(YourDbContext context) : base(context)
    {

    }

    public void UpsertById(int studentId)
    {
        // Your implementation
    }
}

Lifetime

When you register your repositories, you can specify the lifetime of your repositories. By default, it is set to ServiceLifetime.Scoped, but you can provide your default lifetime using:


builder.Services.AddEfLight<Program>(options => {
    options.DefaultLifetime = ServiceLifetime.SingleTransient;
});

On top of that, you can specify the lifetime of each repository using RepositoryLifetime attribute on the repository class:


[RepositoryLifetime(ServiceLifetime.Scoped)]
public class StudentRepository : CrudRepository<Student, int>, IStudentRepository
{
    public StudentRepository(YourDbContext context) : base(context)
    {

    }
}

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