Flexible query mechanism

Object oriented solution

Requesting entities from the entity context must be one of the most used feature of the Entify framework. Entify provides object oriented way to search and filter entities from the entity context. All entity requests are done by creating a new instace of EntityRequest and setting the filters to the created object. After the request object is composed, it's given to the entity context which processes it and returns all the entities that match the given request. Since entity requests are objects you can easily reuse them in your application.

Filter types

There are three kinds of filters that you can set to each entity request. 1) Data filters can be used to filter result set by the value of entity properties. 2) Sorting filter can be used for sorting the result set by one or more propreties. And finally 3) the paging filter can be added to limit entity count in result set. Paging filter is extremly useful in cases when you need to load multiple entities, but only N entites at the time.

Data filters

As stated above, data filters are used for filtering the result set with the values of entity properties. There are many kind of data filters you can add to entity request. There's also composite filter which allows you to compose more complex filters by combining multiple filters together.