To update an existing employee using the DTO, you would load the Employee using IUnitOfWork.FindOne(id), then perform a CopyTo from the DTO into this Employee, then save. Regarding how you would get the ID to pass to FindOne, see http://www.mindscape.co.nz/forums/Post.aspx?ThreadID=2409&PostID=7000.

To create a new Employee using the DTO, you would call new Employee(), then perform a CopyTo into this Employee, then add it to the UOW, then save. This is in fact why DTOs don’t have an Id field: Id is assigned by LightSpeed when it does the add — that is, the Id is *not* assigned by the client.

Hope this clarifies things!

EmployeeDTO[] allEmployees = unitOfWork.Find().Select(e => e.AsDto()).ToArray() ;

Then on the client side someone edits an employee and it is posted back using a service called setEmployee that has a parameter of EmployeeDTO.

And I use your code to create an Employee Entity. i.e

State state = stateDTO.CopyTo(new State())
state.Save() ;

How can the save update the entity, as the EmployeeDTO does not have even a private Id field?

How are people using these DTO objects

We are very excited using LightSpeed. We went furthermore and implemented a WCF, but when I was looking for the DTOConvertor class (even in the last nightly build •Nightly Build for 13 May 2009 – LightSpeedExpress-20090513.msi) it wasn’t present.

Do you have any idea when it will be available, because we are very interested in using LightSpeed with WCF in our project (’cause it’s a must have for us).

Hope to hear from you soon. Thanks in advance!