ADO.NET Metadata
ADO.NET metadata provides both the infrastructure and type hierarchy that are used to describe the Entity Data Model (EDM) in the Entity Framework. The ADO.NET Entity Framework relies on the ADO.NET metadata to expose the conceptual entities, the underlying database tables or views, and the common language runtime (CLR) classes according to the EDM.
The mappings from CLR classes to the conceptual entities and the mappings from the conceptual entities to the underlying database tables or views can also be exposed through ADO.NET metadata. For more information about the models and mappings in the Entity Framework, see Metadata Workspace Overview and Data Modeling in the Entity Framework.
ADO.NET provides the System.Data.Metadata.Edm namespace to manage the metadata services for the Entity Framework. The System.Data.Metadata.Edm namespace includes a set of types that represent concepts used in the models and a set of classes that help applications work with ADO.NET metadata.
The following subtopics describe the metadata type hierarchy and the metadata workspace runtime component.
In This Section
- Metadata Type Hierarchy
Describes a set of types that represent the concepts used in the models in the Entity Framework.
- Metadata Workspace
Describes metadata workspace runtime components that you can use to interact with the EDM metadata in the context of an application.