The majority of Microsoft documentation pushes Entity Framework (EF) as an ORM, which provides a code first approach to development. Unfortunately, EF has a lot of overhead as an ORM, whereas Dapper is twice as fast. I created this project to explore what implementing a Dapper Data Access Layer would look like.

The goal of my architecture was to encapsulate any data access specific logic in the Repository layer of the app. I used the Employee object as an example. EmployeeRepository implements an abstract class which will dictate which data source it will use. In this case, it is using SQL (SqlRepository), but I also stubbed out Document and XML repositories.

SqlRepository (and all other abstract repositories) implements IGenericRepository, which is the minimum required contract for accessing the data source. The abstract repos implement the logic necessary to open a connection with the data sources, which they can easily get from the DbConnectionFactory. Finally, any extension methods that are unique to a model's repository can be implemented in an additional interface - which I demonstrate with IEmployeeRepository.