No more left-right code
I was listening to a legacy Polymorphic Podcast and heard about a really great time saver called AutoMapper.
AutoMapper uses a convention-based matching algorithm to match up source to destination values. It is extremely useful when you have a lot of “left-right code” and want to automate the passing of the values.
For instance, assume you had two objects (e.g. of type stClient & Client), and you wanted to mass copy the values from the stClient object to the Client object.
public struct stClient
{
public string Name;
public int Age;
}
public class Client
{
public string Name { get; set; }
public int Age { get; set; }
public void Load(long ID)
{
tblClient table = new tblClient();
stClient data = table.Get(ID);
Name = data.Name;
Age = data.Age;
}
}
One way you could achieve this is to manually pass the value’s across. However, if you had quite a few values, this would become a laborious task.
With AutoMapper you can bypass this totally. To use AutoMapper you would first have to create a mapping between the types of objects.
Mapper.CreateMap(typeof(stClient), typeof(Client));
You then simply call the mapping method.
public void Load(long ID)
{
tblClient table = new tblClient();
stClient data = table.Get(ID);
Mapper.Map(data, this);
}
And there you go… AutoMapper matches the values from the one object to the other and copies the values across.
