SujaySarma.Sdk.DataSources.AzureTables

The revamped SujaySarma.Sdk.DataSources.AzureTables library.

Dependencies

Other libraries: Microsoft.Azure.Cosmos.Table version 1.0.8+

Compatibility

Json Serialization

This package uses a mix of System.Text.Json (.NET Core 3.0) and the Newtonsoft.Json libraries. This is because there is atleast ONE place in code where the Newtonsoft library is more reliable than the .NET Core library. When and if this changes, we will move to a single consolidated parser.

Usage

Since you are a developer, I will keep this simple. If you have questions, file an issue and I will respond there.

In your Business Class

Import these two namespaces:

using SujaySarma.Sdk.DataSources.AzureTables;
using SujaySarma.Sdk.DataSources.AzureTables.Attributes;

Decorate your class thus:

[Table("UserAccount", UseSoftDelete = true)]
public class UserAccount

The first parameter to the Table attribute is the name of the table. In the above example, the data from the UserAccount business class is stored into a table called UserAccount on Azure Table Storage. The second parameter (UseSoftDelete) is false by default -- setting it to true will mean that when you call a Delete on this class, data is actually soft-deleted -- you will see a Boolean column named IsDeleted set to true in the Azure Table.

Now you need a PartitionKey and a RowKey. Simply decorate the corresponding properties thus:

[PartitionKey]
private string AuthProvider { get; set; }

[RowKey]
private Guid UserId { get; set; }

As long as the data that you store is "url-able" and matches the conditions for partition and row keys as set forth by Azure Table Service, we can use it -- so you can have String, Boolean, Guid, numeric,... data types. Please don't use complex objects (such as other classes) because the engine will serialize it to string, causing problems with ATS.

Decorate other properties with TableColumn attributes providing the name of the column:

[TableColumn("Password")]
private string Password;

Note that the table columns may be class properties or fields. They may be of any visibility scope (public, private, internal, ...). You can have columns that only store data (provide only a GET on the property) or only load data (provide only a SET on the property).

Data modification methods: You first need to get an instance of the AzureTablesDataSource. You may write a small function that does this in common and uses caching so that you do not need to go through this on every call:

You first need to call the GetTableName() (static) method in AzureTablesDataSource class to get the name of the table.

string tableName = AzureTablesDataSource.GetTableName<UserAccount>();

Now initialize an instance of AzureTablesDataSource with your connection string to Azure Storage and the above table name:

AzureTablesDataSource ds = new  AzureTablesDataSource(connectionString, tableName);

Now you may call:

The Insert, Update and Delete methods take an IEnumerable, allowing you to batch the operations.

Here is a nice little helper class I use to get the AzureTablesDataSource instances and cache them:

using SujaySarma.Sdk.Core;
using SujaySarma.Sdk.DataSources.AzureTables;

using System.Collections.Generic;

namespace Extensions
{
    /// <summary>
    /// Provides access to the data sources
    /// </summary>
    internal static class DataLayer
    {

        /// <summary>
        /// Gets an initialized reference to a table data source
        /// </summary>
        /// <typeparam name="T">Type of business object to get table for</typeparam>
        /// <returns>AzureTablesDataSource ready to use</returns>
        public static AzureTablesDataSource GetDataSource<T>()
            where T : class
        {
            string tableName = AzureTablesDataSource.GetTableName<T>();
            if (! tableDataSources.ContainsKey(tableName))
            {
                lock (concurrencyLock)
                {
                    tableDataSources.Add(
                            tableName,
                            new AzureTablesDataSource(connectionString, tableName)
                        );
                }
            }

            return tableDataSources[tableName];
        }


        static DataLayer()
        {
            connectionString = ConfigurationManager.Settings.ConnectionStrings["AzureTableStorage"];
            tableDataSources = new Dictionary<string, AzureTablesDataSource>();
            concurrencyLock = new object();
        }

        private static readonly string connectionString;
        private static readonly Dictionary<string, AzureTablesDataSource> tableDataSources;
        private static readonly object concurrencyLock;

    }
}

With this helper class, my call to Insert a UserAccount becomes:

DataLayer.GetDataSource<UserAccount>().Insert(new [] { this });

Hope you enjoy using this library!