What is the correct way to deploy Lightswitch project database changes to existing databases?

Question

If you are using a Lightswitch project to manage your entities and database changes, how do you deploy changes to the entities to an existing, already deployed project database? Is the best way to run schema compare on the two db versions?

Wohlert

Are the changes not being reflected when you publish? I've been developing locally, and it seems that changes to the entities in Lightswitch are automatically made to the database during publish. Let me know if you see some other behavior. – Lorettelorgnette

I would like to at least check the result with a tool like SqlCompare – Vogue

Answer 1

The LightSwitch Publish wizard automatically creates a change script. It will also stop you if it cannot properly update the database schema (because you have a change that would corrupt data integrity).

LightSwitch does this by examining the destination database and comparing that to the database schema that you are trying to deploy.

Blase

Hi Michael, so what would you do in this case? We are updating the schema frequently and it keeps erroring and we have to blow away the database and deploy from fresh (it's not yet released so this is ok and the easiest) - how will we do updates in the future? – Acrylic

I have not experienced that, I am sorry. – Blase

This issue is also frustrating for me. We would like an option to ignore data integrity! – Galluses