ASP.NET core - can I use an sql view instead of a table in my app?

Question

Hi,

I was just wondering if anyone could offer a bit of help. I'm currently a work term student and I've been asked to create a view in SQL server and use that for the application we are developing. Creating a view is easy enough but I'm not sure on how to use the view inside of the application. I'm building the app with asp.net core. Any help would be appreciated!

Thanks,
Mike P.

Accepted Answer

Assuming you're using Entity Framework Core, make sure you're using EF Core 3 and then it will scaffold views for you as keyless entity types (previously known as query types)- see https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/ef/core/what-is-new/ef-core-3.0/#reverse-engineering-of-database-views. If you're tied to a previous version, you can still do it with query types in 2.1 as long as you scaffold it yourself in OnModelCreating, or whatever version you're on you can always fall back to a raw SQL SELECT statement.

At a lower level, if you're not using EF then for most purposes you can treat views as read-only tables.

Answer

Hi Mike,

If you are use Views in the same manner as you would use a SQL Server database table object.

So, you can either use a stored procedure to query the view and than invoke Stored procedure using ADO.NET from your ASP.NET Core application or you can also use a select query with ADO.NET against you view.