Apologies if there's too much/not enough detail or some of it is irelevant, it's my first post on this board:
Background
I am currently developing a Silverlight 4 and WCF RIA (SP1) based application in C# using VS2010. The stack is: SQL Server -> nHibernate -> Domain Service -> Service Agent -> Silverlight 4 Client (MVVM)
I have 4 tables in the database with the same fields in them each table holding a different 'type' of the same data.
The data should really be in one table with a type column but its a legacy database that I can't change.
I have created a POCO per table and a single domain service that handles accessing and updating the four different entity sets. These types are projected to the Silverlight Client and all the CRUD stuff works as expected.
Problem
I have a viewmodel that in which contains an ObservableCollection where T is one of the 4 entity types, however I don't want to use 4 collections to hold the different entity types. The UI will allow the user to select a type and I want to use the same collection and UI bindings to edit that data.
I have tried
Creating a generic domain service, but they are not supported.
Having the server side entity types inherit from an abstract class or implement an interface but domain services don't project abstract classes or interfaces.
Creating client side partial classes for the 4 projected entities that implement a client side interface. However when I try and assign the ObservableCollection<MyEntity> to ObservableCollection<MyEntityInterface> I Get the following error:
Cannot implicitly convert type 'System.Collections.ObjectModel.ObservableCollection<BusinessDomain.StandardInterestRate>' to 'System.Collections.ObjectModel.ObservableCollection<BusinessDomain.IInterestRate>'
I suspect the reason is that StandardInterestRate inherits from the RIA Entity class. Any thoughts appreciated.
Try
ObservableCollection<MyEntity> entities = ...
ObservableCollection<MyEntityInterface> iEntities = new ObservableCollection(entities.Cast<MyEntityInterface>());