GuruStop.NET

This is a PowerPoint Presentation (and extraction of the contents) I made as per a couple of friends’ request (@EmadAshi and @AmrEldib) to show how OAuth works along with Twitter and how easy it is to cache OAuth credentials.

As I was doing related work for TweetToEmail. I felt a PowerPoint presentation will be even better than a blog post for this one, but here you get the two.

The Presentation

The Contents

Application Registration

• A Twitter user creates a Twitter Application
  • If the application is web based, it needs to provide a URL. “Localhost” is not accepted as a domain for this URL
• A Twitter Application gets two pieces of information
• Consumer Key
• Consumer Secret
• A Twitter Application will use these in all coming requests.

Initializing The Process

• User comes to the application and it decides to authenticate against Twitter
• Application makes a request using Consumer Key and Secret to obtain “Oauth Request Token”, which consists of two parts
  • Token
  • Token Secret
• Application makes authentication URL including the “Oauth Request Token” parameter, and optionally a “Call-back URL” (if different than default URL in first step)

If you don’t know what eager loading is, Jump to “What’s eager loading?”.

Eager Loading Syntax

If you are eager loading Products for example in a typical (Categories 1<->* Products) relation, the standard syntax would like:

DbDataContext.Categories.Include(“Products”)

What is the problem with that?

The “Products” part. The word “Products” is a string. If I rename the Products table to ShopProducts or whatever or even remove it from this data diagram and have it elsewhere, or even something wrong happens and the relation is removed from DB/diagram by mistake, my code will still compile, but will fail when it runs. This is BAD BAD BAD.

How to solve this?

Since I always believe that if something exists somewhere you shouldn’t do it yourself unless its totally broken (and I mean REALLY REALLY BROKEN), I started searching inside the Entity Framework itself for something to get the entity name from.

At first it seemed super easy. Every entity class has a static property “EntityKeyPropertyName”, so, I thought I can write something like:

DbDataContext.Categories.Include(Product.EntityKeyPropertyName); // But this didn’t work