We have experienced difficulties in both these areas using the Entity Framework, and in this article, I will be describing the cause of the issues, and the solutions that we at MetaSys came up with. If you are having performance issues with Entity Framework, this article might provide some useful insight and suggestions.

Our issues with the  Entity Framework:

Let me quickly brief you about how we started using Entity Framework. We started application development of a .NET web application roughly 10 years ago. At the time, Entity Framework was a new concept introduced by Microsoft. Its purpose was to allow the developer to more easily write SQL queries including calculations, it also simplified CRUD operations and handled results into objects. We used Entity Framework for our web application, and during initial testing, everything was working very well.

The performance issues arose after the client started using the application, particularly as the amount of data in the database started growing. We used the Ants Profiler tool to identify the root cause of poor performance. It showed us that stored procedures were executed fast without any significant delay, but with the Entity Framework code, it was taking a long time to render data on a page.

Another issue was that the SQL database for the application had more than 300 tables. Updating the Entity model with a change in any of the tables would take a very long time. It was also difficult to merge changes of only one developer, or only one module, as it would update the entire Entity model. This made it a challenge to release the application module-wise.

MetaSys Approach :

To overcome performance issues, we first tried to change some of the settings of EDMX, and secondly updated the Entity Framework to the latest version. Neither made much difference to the performance. In the meanwhile, the applications database size and complexity kept on growing, as the application grew.

Eventually, we replaced the Entity with ADO.NET, and we immediately saw a significant improvement in performance. The difficulty we faced with the conversion was how to handle the ADO.NET result into objects. We resolved this using the open-source Dapper ORM. Dapper is a framework for mapping relational object models. Like Entity Framework, It eases the handling of data in objects and supports multiple data query results. This solution not only improved the page loading time, but as there was no need to update the entity model, the developer’s time also reduced significantly.

So far we have found that using ADO.Net with Dapper ORM solved all the problems we experienced with the Entity Framework.

About Us:

Our team of Dot Net developers have experience of building Dot Net solutions using Microsoft technologies for more than two decades using VB to latest .Net Core applications. For more info. https://www.metasyssoftware.com/dot-net

Case study

Our client wanted a way to efficiently track day to day reporting, check the status and progress of different tasks, and financial metrics like revenue, costs and profit-loss data. Previously, they had to access several different reports to analyse the overall business performance. We built a dashboard that allowed them to visualise the day to day business activities on a single screen, saving time and energy.

We decided to use Google Charts for a number of reasons:

• Google Charts are a good tool for visualization as the graphics are highly interactive.
• There is a large gallery of chart types that allow for a lot of customisation for representing different kinds of data.
• It is compatible with different browsers.

Technology and Implementation

For the implementation of the dashboard we used jQuery and ASP.net. These technologies are easy to use, and allow for easy rendering of the page. Furthermore, Google Charts have an inbuilt library in jQuery.

Implementation steps of Google chart in ASP.NET

Before the implementation, all the Google Chart Libraries and the visualization API need to be loaded. The following procedure was used to include a chart in ASP.net:

1. Create an html div to hold the chart as per our requirement.
2. Ajax call for loading data in the chart
3. Call the Visualization API before assigning it to the chart and set the chart options like legends and axis titles
4. Assign the div id to the chart
5. The call to the chart depends on the chart type (barchart, donut chart etc.).
6. Call the draw method of the Google chart and set the chart option.

Chart examples

Donut Chart:

Stack Chart:

Matching client requirements

Our main challenge was to modify the chart to meet the clients needs.  For example, the client specified that the revenue chart was to be displayed in a rectangular format without a legend, or axes. We identified the “Timeline chart” as the most appropriate chart option amongst the templates although it still required customization. We modified the inbuilt generated SVG code from JavaScript by specifying the position and width and by hiding the x- and y-axes to match the client requirements.

If you are interested in a similar implementation of data visualisation, feel free to contact us. Our team has extensive experience in handling diverse custom ASP.NET application projects. https://www.metasyssoftware.com/contact