PetaPoco - A couple of little tweaks

This post is about PetaPoco - "a tiny ORMish thing for your POCOs". Read more on the PetaPoco Project Page.

These changes are in response to some great suggestions by Chris Marisic (@dotnetchris). Thanks Chris.

Sql.Builder

In order to make the Sql builder a little more "fluenty", I've added a new static Builder property to the Sql class that simply returns a new instance of the Sql class. So now, instead of this:

new Sql().Append("SELECT * FROM whatever");

it's now:

Sql.Builder.Append("SELECT * FROM _whatever");

It's an almost trivial change, but it now reads better.

Auto Select Clause Improvement

Previously PetaPoco could automatically convert this:

var a = db.SingleOrDefault<article>("WHERE id=@0", 123);

into this:

var a = db.SingleOrDefault<article>("SELECT col1, col2, col3 FROM articles WHERE  id=@0", 123);

But now it will also handle this:

var a = db.SingleOrDefault<article>("FROM whatever WHERE id=@0", 123);

In otherwords if it sees a statement that starts with FROM, it puts in just the SELECT and column list and not the FROM clause.

T4 Template Improvements

It seems there's a weird quirk with NuGet where it installs files in reverse alphabetical order. This resulted in the T4 template getting installed before the required include files and therefore a bunch of errors ensued.

So Record.tt has now been renamed to Database.tt as per David Ebbo's suggestion. Thanks David.

While I was at it, I also made some template improvements to make it work a bit more automatically and to give better feedback if something goes wrong. Now, if you have a valid connection string in your project and you install PetaPoco with NuGet, you should automatically get everything generated - and if not, a Database.cs file with an appropriate error message.

As always, this is all available in GitHub and NuGet now.