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One of the most common activities of software development is mapping (converting) between different representations of the same thing. Existing libraries tend to be specific to a domain, for example:

• Automapper can be used to map between objects
• EntityFramework can be used to map between database and objects.

There are two common approaches to mapping:

1. Configuration, be that in code, metadata attributes or external files;
2. Convention, i.e. the name of things must match.

I think that in many cases a rules based mapping is more applicable, i.e.

1. Try a case insensitive match - as humans we don't distinguish words of different case as different, but computers tend too
2. Remove underscores and try to match
3. Remove repeating words and try to match, e.g. when mapping from ORDER_ID database column to an Order class then try mapping to ID.

What about all the edge cases, I believe the above rules will get all mappings 95% correct, so what about the other 5%? Rather than trying to define all possible rules I prefer to allow custom mapping code to be injected to handle the edge cases.