I've been playing a bit with DLINQ generally and with stored procedure execution a little bit.

If I'm using something like Northwind and its customer table then I create a stored procedure such as;

create procedure dbo.GetCustomersByCountry
@country nvarchar(30)
as
set nocount on

select CustomerID, CompanyName, ContactName, ContactTitle, Address,City, Region, PostalCode, Country, Phone, Fax, recordVersion
from dbo.Customers
where Country=@country
go

And that's all fine. And if I use the sqlmetal.exe tool with its /sprocs flag then I can go ahead and get a method to use to invoke that stored proc as in;

  [StoredProcedure(Name="GetCustomersByCountry")]
  public StoredProcedureResult<GetCustomersByCountryResult> GetCustomersByCountry([Parameter(DBType="NVarChar(30)")] string country) {
    return this.ExecuteStoredProcedure<GetCustomersByCountryResult>(((MethodInfo)(MethodInfo.GetCurrentMethod())), country);
  }

The "problem" I have with this is that it returns some kind of enumeration of GetCustomersByCountryResult but really what I want it to return is IEnumerable<Customers> because otherwise in my program I have two types (Customer,GetCustomersByCountryResult> which look identical but aren't actually related (clearly, I could project one into the other).

My other "question" with GetCustomersByCountryResult is that it has no association with the table called "Customers" in the database and, so, any changes that I make through this type will not show up back in my database when I call SubmitChanges.

So, I ended up hacking it around a bit. I changed the definition that SqlMetal produced for me into;

[StoredProcedure(Name="GetCustomersByCountry")]
public StoredProcedureResult<Customer> GetCustomersByCountry([Parameter(DBType="NVarChar(30)")] string country) {
return this.ExecuteStoredProcedure<Customer>(((MethodInfo)(MethodInfo.GetCurrentMethod())), country);

and that gives me back an enumeration of Customer just fine and I altered my calling code so that it did something like;

IEnumerable<Customer> customers = 
      from c in context.GetCustomersByCountry("UK")
      select c;

    foreach (Customer res in customers)
    {
      context.Customers.Attach(res);
      res.Country = "GB";
    }
    context.SubmitChanges();

and that seems to give me the effect that I want but I'm not at all sure that it's the right thing to be doing and, if it is, I feel like the generation layer should give me an option to get it all done there.

(I'm still on the May CTP so lots of things might have changed here).