c# - Correct use of multimapping in Dapper

Question

I'm trying to use the multimapping feature of Dapper to return a list of ProductItems and associated Customers.

[Table("Product")]
public class ProductItem
{
    public decimal ProductID { get; set; }        
    public string ProductName { get; set; }
    public string AccountOpened { get; set; }
    public Customer Customer { get; set; }
} 

public class Customer
{
    public decimal CustomerId { get; set; }
    public string CustomerName { get; set; }
}

My Dapper code:

var sql = @"select * from Product p 
            inner join Customer c on p.CustomerId = c.CustomerId 
            order by p.ProductName";

var data = con.Query<ProductItem, Customer, ProductItem>(
    sql,
    (productItem, customer) => {
        productItem.Customer = customer;
        return productItem;
    },
    splitOn: "CustomerId,CustomerName"
);

This works fine, but I seem to have to add the complete column list to the "splitOn" parameter to return all the customers' properties. If I don't add "CustomerName", it returns null. Am I misunderstanding the core functionality of the multimapping feature? I don't want to have to add a complete list of column names each time.

Answer 1

I just ran a test that works fine:

var sql = "select cast(1 as decimal) ProductId, 'a' ProductName, 'x' AccountOpened, cast(1 as decimal) CustomerId, 'name' CustomerName";

var item = connection.Query<ProductItem, Customer, ProductItem>(sql,
    (p, c) => { p.Customer = c; return p; }, splitOn: "CustomerId").First();

item.Customer.CustomerId.IsEqualTo(1);

The splitOn param needs to be specified as the split point, it defaults to Id. If there are multiple split points, you will need to add them in a comma delimited list.

Say your recordset looks like this:

ProductID | ProductName | AccountOpened | CustomerId | CustomerName 
---------------------------------------   -------------------------

Dapper needs to know how to split the columns in this order into 2 objects. A cursory look shows that the Customer starts at the column CustomerId, hence splitOn: CustomerId.

There is a big caveat here, if the column ordering in the underlying table is flipped for some reason:

ProductID | ProductName | AccountOpened | CustomerName | CustomerId  
---------------------------------------   -------------------------

splitOn: CustomerId will result in a null customer name.

If you specify CustomerId,CustomerName as split points, dapper assumes you are trying to split up the result set into 3 objects. First starts at the beginning, second starts at CustomerId, third at CustomerName.