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Intrinsic Database In Lightswitch 2011

In this tutorial I will explain about intrinsic database in lightswitch application.

Software Requirement

Before you start reading this tutorial you should make sure that

Visual studio 2010 is installed on your machine.
Visual Studio 2010 service pack 1 is installed on your machine.
Microsoft Visual Studio Light switch 2011 is installed on your machine.
Silverlight runtime version 4 or 5 is installed on your machine

Prerequisite Knowledge

Before you go ahead, it is required that you should know

How to create a new project using visual studio?
Basic knowledge about SQL server and its objects like tables etc
What are screens and entities in lightswitch?
How to create a screen in lightswitch application?

Steps Of Execution

In this tutorial I will execute certain steps for the demonstration of intrinsic database in lightswitch application. These steps are

Create a new project
Add table in the project
How to connect to intrinsic database
Check intrinsic database

Let us execute each step

Create A New Project

First of all create a new lightswitch application. See the screen shot below for project structure

Picture showing the project structure of the lightswitch application in solution explorer

Click to Enlarge

Add Table In The Project

Add a new table in the project. See the screen shot below for table structure

Picture showing the Person table in the design view of the lightswitch designer

Click to Enlarge

Once the table is added in project compile the project.

How To Connect To Intrinsic Database

Once you compile the project a mdf file is created at ‘$(projectdir)\bin\data’ location. See the screen shot below

Picture showing the intrinsic database created on the local drive when the project is compiled

Click to Enlarge

The table which we have just created in lightswitch is stored in this mdf file. To check the table we need to open this file in SQL Server Management Studio.

Following steps will be followed to open the file.

First of all open SSMS in administrator mode. You can do that by right click on SSMS icon and select ‘Run as administrator’

Picture showing opening the SSMS in the admin mode

Click to Enlarge

Once you click on the option a popup appears asking you for your confirmation. Click on Yes and your SSMS opens in an administrative mode.
Once you open the database right click on the database and click on Attach as shown in figure below

Picture showing an option to attach the intrinsic database in SSMS

Click to Enlarge

A pop up window appears to select the mdf file. Select the file from ‘$(projectdir)\bin\data ‘ location as mentioned in last section.
Once you select the file a database is added in your list.

Check Intrinsic Database

You can see the table ‘People’ which we have added using lightswitch. Apart from that we have some other tables which are used for managing users and roles.

Picture showing the list of database objects of the intrinsic database

Click to Enlarge

Posted By -	Karan Gupta

Posted On -	Thursday, August 8, 2013

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