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Categories
.Net C#

A quick introduction to Dapper!

Dapper is a micro ORM tool with very high performance and very decent features. Dapper is one of my favourite tools. Dapper has excellent documentation here and here.

Dapper supports SQL statements and Stored Procedures. My preference is usually Stored Procs over SQL statements.

Dapper extends the IDbConnection interface and thus several methods are added on the connection object.

If you have a class Person with Id and Name, Dapper can handle mapping:

using(var connection = new MySqlConnection(connectionString){
    await connection.OpenAsync();

    var persons = await connection.QueryAsync<Person>("SELECT Id, Name FROM Person WHERE ....");
}

The above code snippet shows how to query the database and get a IEnumerable of Person objects.

There are several other methods, and each method has both synchronous and asynchronous versions, some of them have Generic versions for mapping to objects such as:

.Execute / ExecuteAsync
.ExecuteReader / ExecuteReaderAsync
.ExecuteScalar / ExecuteScalarAsync
.ExecuteScalar<T> / ExecuteScalarAsync<T>
etc...

Passing in parameters is also very straightforward, parameters can be passed in as an existing object or

new {Id = 1}

Even transactions and list of objects are supported.

Multiple resultsets are supported etc… If you are familiar with ADO.Net, using Dapper would be very easy, straightforward and much easier and has very excellent performance with minimal overhead.

Entity Framework is a close 2nd choice when dealing with Database-First approach. If using Code-First approach, Entity Framework would be the preferred choice.

Hoping this blog post helps someone.