MVC 5 Demo Project With Entity Framework (DB First)

The data source will be filled up automatically which you have given on the previous screen and you have to fill up the Server name field which in my case is ‘.\SQLEXPRESS’. Then, select one option from below. Either ‘select or enter database name’ or ‘attach a database file’. I have chosen the first one and then from the drop-down, select your database name. Then, click OK.

Here, your connection string is automatically generated and is shown. Copy it and save it somewhere for future use. Click "Next".



Click "Next".



Whatever is in your database can be exported to the project. Select the option which you want to export. For this tutorial, I am just exporting the tables so I have selected the first option only. Click "Finish".



After clicking Finish, you will see that this window will be previewed to you. The diagram is automatically generated from your database relationships. Other than that, classes will be generated automatically as Item class is generated in this case.



This is the Context class which will be automatically generated.



This is the Item class generated from the table Item in the database.

Now, add the reference of this class library project to your UI/MVC project. Right on the ‘Reference’ option shown under the project of MVC/UI project, select "Add Reference". Now, select Projects option from the left and check the checkbox of your class library project and click OK.

This is how your reference will be added. DAL can be seen in above image for my case.

Now, right click on DAL project and create a new folder of ‘Repository’. Then, right-click on Repository folder and create a new class ‘ItemRepository.cs’. And then, write a function to get all items from the database. This is how it will look.



Now, on web application project, expand Controllers folder and open HomeController. Edit the ‘Index’ action method which will now call the function of ItemRepository to get all items, as shown below.

After calling the repository function, I have saved it in a ViewBag so that on the View page, I can access the data from ViewBag.

Now expand the ‘Views’ folder and then expand the ‘Home’ folder. Open the ‘Index’ page and make these changes to it.

Now, add a connection string in the web application project. Open ‘Web.config’ file and add the connection string which was saved in the above steps while we were making a connection with the database. Here is my connection string.

Now, run the application and you can see the result. All the items are shown in the grid form which were fetched from the database.



This is how MVC works with Entity Framework Database First Approach.

I hope you will like this article and it will help you.

The source code and DB backup file are attached. You can download and use these.