MongoDB with MVC4 Web-API C#

Mongo db is a document oriented database. Mongo db has a free and commercial version. It is scalable, open source and document oriented. All Nosql db are document oriented mostly.  Main data base types are RDBMS, OLAP & NoSql. NoSql db are for Big data store and faster access. It is scalable. Scalable means db can be stored in commodity computers, so NoSql databases is horizontal scalable. (Hadoop).

NoSql has mainly 3 types-

1>Key-Value, 2> Tabular, 3> Document Oriented. Mongo is document oriented NoSql Db. NoSql does not have relations. It does not support complex database. But the features are there is - Fast Performance, Query-able, scalable.  In brief, NoSql is for performance, RDBMS is for functionality, though it is not cent right from all aspects.

In case of Mongo, collections are same as tables in RDBMS. Table has recorded in row. But in mongodb stores document (BSON) in collection.

Example-

{_id:”123”, name:”subhadip”,address:”agarpara”},{_id:”124”,name:”nemo”,addresses:[{address:”add1”},{address:”add2”}]}

You can see an unstructured data collection.

Now , query to extract data from collection is there in No-Sql.

Example- db.employee.find({name:”subhadip”});

Indexing is possible in MongoDB. Ad hoc queries like- search by field, regular expression can be used. Distributed database supported in mongodb. Load-balancing is a build in feature. Mongodb has file storage functions available (GridFS). Aggregation in MongoDB is possible using map reduce. Mongo db understands longitude and latitude in its own. For business logics no need to convert record to object, it is already structured as object in code.

It supports almost all popular OS (Windows, Linux, Mac, etc).

Now lets jump to code using MVC 4, C#, MongoDriver.

Create a db in mongo called company and it should have a collection -employees.[_id,Name,Address](_id will be auto generated).

Create DB Command- >use Company (enter)

Create Collection Command->  db.Employees.insert({Name:'Subha',Address:'agarpara;}) (enter)

Install MongoC#Driver from Add Libary Package Reference. 

Ok, Lets start coding.

First , Create Model-

    public class Employee

    {

        [ScaffoldColumn(false)]

        [BsonId]

        public ObjectId EmpId { get; set; }

        [ScaffoldColumn(false)]

        public string Name { get; set; }

        [ScaffoldColumn(false)]

        public string Address { get; set; }

    }

Now , Create MongoDBContext-

public class MongoDBCS

    {

        public MongoDatabase db;

        public MongoDBCS()

        {

            var con =

                new MongoConnectionStringBuilder(ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings["MongoDBString"].ConnectionString);

            var server = MongoServer.Create(con);

             db = server.GetDatabase(con.DatabaseName);

        }

        public MongoCollection<Employee> Employees

        {

            get

            {

                return db.GetCollection<Employee>("Employees");

            }

            set { }

        }

    }

Now, Create controller(API)-

public class EmployeeController : ApiController

    {

        private MongoDBCS MongoContext;

        public  EmployeeController()

        {

            MongoContext = new MongoDBCS();

        }

        // GET api/employee

        public IEnumerable<Employee> Get()

        {

         

            var el = MongoContext.Employees;

            return el.FindAll();

        }

     

        // POST api/employee

        public void Post(Employee emp)

        {

            var el = MongoContext.Employees;

            el.Save(emp);

        }

        // DELETE api/employee/5

        public void Delete(string name)

        {

            var el = MongoContext.Employees;

            el.Remove(Query.EQ("Name", name));

        }

    

    }

Web.config will have db connection string –

<add name="MongoDBString" connectionString="server=127.0.0.1;database=company" />

That’s it.Now, You know how to work with MongoDB and C# MVC4.

Knockout Js Quick Start

Knockout js is a Javascript library which follows MVVM. It interacts or binds model with dom(view) element using ViewModel.  Now through this we can bind text, events, conditions and iterators(loop). The syntax is- data-bind=”<kind of binding> :<scope param>.  

 Example-

   <span data-bind="text: name"></span>

Another example-

   <div data-bind="if: address!=''"><span data-bind="text: address"></span></div>

Here, a conditional data binding is happening and under it, another text binding shown.

Now, let have a bit more in to it. It will cover few real scenarios-

HTML
   <div id="div_test">
    <ul data-bind="foreach: products"><!--scope starts-->
        <li><label data-bind="text: $index" ></label>&nbsp; <!--shows index count-->
            <span data-bind="text: name"></span>&nbsp;<!--conditional binding template starts-->
            <div data-bind="ifnot: rate > 20"><span data-bind="text: rate"></span></div>
            <div data-bind="with:plot">
                <span data-bind="text: width + '-' +height"></span></div> 
            <a data-bind="attr: {href:'#/'+name}" >click</a>          
            <div data-bind="if: address!=''"><span data-bind="text: address"></span></div>
        </li>
<!--conditional binding template starts-->
     </ul>
<!--scope ends-->
     <button data-bind="click: onclick">Click</button><!--event binding-->
   </div>

 Javascript

function scope(){
    var $scope=this;
//Json binding---->
    $scope.products=[{name:"test",
                                   address:"agarpara",
                                   rate:22,
                                   plot:{width:1110,height:800}
                                 },               
                                {name:"test2",
                                  rate:18,
                                  plot:{width:1500,height:600}}];
//Event binding------>
    $scope.onclick=function(){
        alert("Clicked");
    };
}
ko.applyBindings(new scope(),document.getElementById("div_test"));//apply a scope by a dom id

Few more working examples are in here