Dacpac Explorer

I have been playing around with the DacFx Api alot recently and am finishing  off the week with a final demo, the dacpac explorer:

https://github.com/GoEddie/DacpacExplorer/raw/master/download/DacPacExplorer.zip

Github repo is here

What this does is open a dacpac file and show an explorer like interface to let you see what is inside the dacpac without having to manually extract it and then go searching for what you want, I will write a further blog on how it uses the DacFx api but I have tried where possible to use the model to make displaying objects as easy as possible so for example to show all the properties of an object I use:

foreach (var property in item.ObjectType.Properties.OrderBy(p => p.Name))
{
var val = property.GetValue<object>(item);
if (val == null)
{
val = “NULL”;
}

Console.WriteLine(“Property Name: {0} Value: {1}”, property.Name, val.ToString());

}

item in this case is of course our good olf friend TSqlObject.

One extra thing that the Dacpac Explorer does is to give you the option to validate the model when it opens it, this will then give you a list of any warnings or errors (of course if there are no errors then it let’s you know that!), to use the demo app you just choose the dacpac file and choose open, if you want to validate the model then tick the checkbox:

When you then open the dacpac you get a nice (bear in mind I am a developer and data guy and not a designer! ) explorer like interface for viewing the dacpac contents, I have used the adventure works schema as an example:

 

 

This is just a small example of what we can do with the DacFx API, I will write some blogs about how it all works as there are some things that weren’t immediately obvious to me how to do things like getting a columns data type and the columns that belong to an index, but once you see a simple example it is pretty straightforward.

 

Have you used the DacFx Api to write a tool around Sql Server? Share it! Have a request? Share it!