Would it be possible to add something to the BOMapper so that we can specify descriptions for fields. It would be helpful for so that we could use these descriptions for display purposes on our forms.



We have read a few posts concerning field descriptions in the BO and it appears that the Description attribute gets set as the field name by the BOMapper, and if we change it then it just gets overridden.

This has been requested before and so this is already under consideration.  Just FYI, if you use the DDT these field descriptions are brought over from there and already provides this functionality.

Thanks.... We don't use DDT.

Any idea if this is planned?  We are looking to write some auditing code and it would make our lives SO much easier if we could pull an audit description directly from the BO field descriptor. 

We're looking into using the MS_Description from SQL Server as the <summary> tag for the Doc Comments.  That means that whatever you put as the description for the column within Enterprise Manager or SQL Server Management Studio, will show up within intellisense like the description from the DDT does.

That sounds awesome...Is that something we can access now?  I didn't realize that existed. 

BTW...when did you become a fighter pilot Ben?

Hehe, i'm not a fighter pilot... just pulled the avatar off my www.bungie.net account.  (It's Master Chief.)

No, the functionality is not there right now, I was just telling you what we plan on implementing to give you a heads up and see if that would work for you...

Sounds like it would definitely work.  Is that something that requires SQL 2005?  If so, would the users have to have 2005 or just developers?  I assume just developers if the descriptions would be housed inside the BOs themselves.  That would be ideal since our users have a variety of db providers.

Yes, the descriptions would be retrieved when the business object's partial class was built and they would stay there until the partial class was rebuilt again.

I believe there is a description property within SQL Server 2000 as well as 2005... maybe even back to 6.5 or so, but for sure 2000+