Best practices for prepopulated tables via OrmLite in Servicestack - orm

Question

I'm generating tables via OrmLite and I was wondering about best practices for prepopulating tables. Example tables - countries, states, cities, etc.
I can think of a few ways to pre-populate tables:
List item
Seed DB
API (when possible)
Static file
In code
Separate project
However, in some cases the data could get large as in the example of cities around the world so in code is not viable.
I could also consider generating tables that need to be pre-populated directly via another project where I can fetch data from a source and get it into the DB.
However, I was wondering about the scenario when you do generate it via an ORM (especially in production). How would you approach the problem?
This must be a common problem across all ORM's.

Answer 1

If it's only code tables like countries, states, etc, they're small enough to still have them as part of the project, normally I'd create a separate static class called SeedData with all the data in POCO's
1. Maintaining Code Tables in Host Project
public static class SeedData
{
public static List<Country> Countries
{
get { return new[] { new Country(...), ... }; }
}
}
Then in your AppHost populate add a flag on whether to re-create them on startup, e.g:
public void Configure(Container container)
{
var appSettings = new AppSettings(); //Read from Web.config <appSettings/>
if (appSettings.Get("RecreateTables", false))
{
using (var db = container.Resolve<IDbConnectionFactory>().Open())
{
db.DropAndCreateTable<Country>();
db.InsertAll(SeedData.Countries);
...
}
}
}
Change AppSetting to recreate tables
This will then let you re-create the tables and re-populate the data when you change the RecreateTables appSetting to True, e.g:
<appSettings>
<add key="RecreateTables" value="True" />
</appSettings>
As the default behavior of ASP.NET will automatically restart the AppDomain, just saving a change to Web.config is enough to restart your ASP.NET application the next time any page gets refreshed.
2. Add to Test Project in adhoc Explicit Test
If the Data gets too big to fit in the working project I would first move it to a separate test project inside an [Explicit] text fixture (so it's never automatically run), that you can easily run manuallu, e.g:
[Explicit]
[TestFixture]
public class AdminTasks
{
[Test]
public void Recreate_and_populate_tables()
{
var dbFactory = new OrmLiteConnectionFactory(...);
using (var db = dbFactory.Open())
{
db.DropAndCreateTable<Country>();
db.InsertAll(SeedData.Countries);
...
}
}
}
3. Save data in external static text Files
Finally if the data is even too big to fit in C# classes, I would then save it out to a static file in the test that you can easily re-hydrate into POCO's that you can populate with OrmLite, e.g:
[Test]
public void Recreate_and_populate_tables()
{
var dbFactory = new OrmLiteConnectionFactory(...);
using (var db = dbFactory.Open())
{
db.DropAndCreateTable<Country>();
var countries = File.ReadAllText("~/countries.txt".MapAbsolutePath())
.FromJson<List<Country>>();
db.InsertAll(countries);
...
}
}