Working with data

ReFlex CMS includes a powerful and highly flexible Object-Relational Mapper (or ORM) that greatly accelerates object persistance and retrieval from databases. Driver and dialect are both abstracted and can be easily extended to support most databases supporting SQL. Persistence and relationship options are set using attributes in your classes and their properties / fields, and queries are built automatically, you never need to write SQL again.

Microsoft SQL Server is supported as standard, however other databases such as MySQL are being integrated for release early 2010.

This example works with both the pre-purchase evaluation and full versions of ReFlex CMS. Ensure you have a working copy of the software then follow these steps to familiarise yourself with the ReFlex.Data namespace.

1. Download the source code
2. Run the /db/Sample.sql file against your ReFlex CMS installations database
3. Have a quick look through the code in /App_Code/Example/Data/*, /App_Code/Example/Managers/*, and the  /TestExample.aspx.cs file
4. Run the TestExample.aspx file in Visual Studio and start playing around

You will quickly see how easy it is to persist, retrieve and bind your data based objects.