Thoughts from the Wet Coast
The musings of an ASP.NET Developer from Canada's We(s)t Coast

In my continuing series on NoSQL Databases I have been mainly describing some of the concepts behind NoSQL (and in particular Document) Databases.  In this post I will start to dive into some code.

As mentioned earlier I will be using RavenDB as this is a .NET friendly database.

In this first example lets create a simple ASP.NET MVC 3 Application that uses RavenDB as its data source.

I will start with a simple “My Tasks” Application which I created by using the Internet Application template in ASP.NET MVC 3.  Next I created a simple Task model class (Listing 1).

public class Task {     public int TaskId { get; set; }     public string Title { get; set; }     public string Description { get; set; }     public bool IsComplete { get; set; } }

I then used the Scaffolding available in ASP.NET MVC 3 to create a TaskController (Figure 1), as well as the Entity Framework DataContext class and all the Razor Views necessary for CRUD operations.

Figure 1: Scaffold a new TaskController class

And finally I created a SQL Server Compact Edition Database to store the data and a Tasks table with columns that matched the names and types of the Task class’s properties.

To prove that everything was wired up correctly I browsed to the application and added some data (Figure 2).

Figure 2: A List of Tasks

But the goal of this application is to use RavenDB as the database, not to create an EF Code First/SQL CE application.

As I mentioned in the 3rd post in this series, RavenDB can be configured in three different ways.  I am going to use the embedded mode.  Luckily, RavenDB is available as a NuGet package.  To add a NuGet package to a Visual Studio project we can right-click on the References folder (Figure 3).

Figure 3: Add a new Nuget package

and select “Manage NuGet Packages”.  In the Package Manager window enter Raven  in the search box and install the RavenDB (Embedded) package (Figure 4).

Figure 4: Install RavenDB using NuGet

The installation adds quite a few assemblies to the bin folder.

Next we need to configure Raven, so we will create a Folder in the App_Data folder call “Database” (Figure 5),

Figure 5: Create a new Database Folder for the RavenDB database

and we will modify the connection string that RavenDB added to the web.config to point to the folder we just created.

So now we are all set up ready to convert our application to use RavenDB, and in the next post I will show how to hook up the existing TaskController class, so we can store our tasks in an embedded RavenDB database instead of a SQL Compact database.