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Annotation and Research Collaboration Tool (EDM Sample Application)

  • Article

Doing research online often leads to many Web page references and contact-information entries for people related to various topics. Keeping track of this information after it is generated is a data management task that can be simplified by using entities and associations in an application that is built on the Entity Data Model (EDM).

The Annotation and Research Collaboration Tool aids research and collaboration by creating reference annotations and contact entities that can be searched for both relevant Web pages and people associated with topics or search texts.

The application implements entities that represent Web page references, reference descriptors, and contact information. One EDM association is defined to connect Web page references and reference descriptors. A second association, defined as a many-to-many association, is used to connect Web page references and contact information for people with whom the user might want additional collaboration on the topic of the reference.

The following four entities are used by this application:

  • Reference

  • ReferenceDescriptor

  • ContactPerson

  • ContactPersonReference (A link table entity)

The following associations are used to connect references with annotations and contacts:

  • ReferenceDescriptor_Reference

  • LinkTable_ContactPerson

  • LinkTable_Reference

The following UI display shows the running application. Clicking the Find by Keywords button with the term "Azure" in the search-phrase text box has resulted in a list of annotations and related contacts. Links to Web pages on the topic of the search can be clicked in the results to display referenced Web pages. In the illustration, the visible link has been clicked to display the referenced URL in the Web Browser. A similar query using the Find Ref Person button would return results sorted by contacts instead of by topic field.

Research Collaboration Tool UI

To annotate a Web page, open the page, add a keyword to the keyword text box and/or an annotation to the input/output text area. Click the Add Reference button.

To link contact information to a Web page, open the page, enter contact information to the text boxes for first name, last name, title, and e-mail. Click Create Association to Person.

This application runs well against storage implemented in a SQL Server Compact 3.5 SP1 database. The data can be synchronized across SQL Server Compact 3.5 SP1 installations to make it available to multiple users, or the application can run against SQL Server for use by network users.

Downloading and Running the Sample

The Annotation and Research Collaboration tool project is available on the ADO.NET Entity Framework Documentation Samples resource page in MSDN Code Gallery. Requirements and instructions for building and running the sample are provided in the readme.htm file in the download package.

For discussion of the schemas and application code used by this data model, see, Annotation Research Tool Schemas (EDM Sample Application) and Annotation Research Tool Application Code (EDM Sample Application).

See Also

Concepts

Annotation Research Tool Schemas (EDM Sample Application)
Annotation Research Tool Application Code (EDM Sample Application)
Implementing Entities (EDM)

Other Resources

EDM Specifications
Schemas and Mapping Specification (Entity Framework)