Book Image

Mastering Entity Framework

By : Rahul Rajat Singh
Book Image

Mastering Entity Framework

By: Rahul Rajat Singh

Overview of this book

<p>Data access is an integral part of any software application. Entity Framework provides a model-based system that makes data access effortless for developers by freeing you from writing similar data access code for all of your domain models.</p> <p>Mastering Entity Framework provides you with a range of options when developing a data-oriented application. You’ll get started by managing the database relationships as Entity relationships and perform domain modeling using Entity Framework. You will then explore how you can reuse data access layer code such as stored procedures and table-valued functions, and perform various typical activities such as validations and error handling. You’ll learn how to retrieve data by querying the Entity Data Model and understand how to use LINQ to Entities and Entity SQL to query the Entity Data Model.</p>
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Mastering Entity Framework
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Seeding data


So far, we have seen how we can take control over the location of the database and name of the database and how we can set the database initialization strategy. One thing to note here is that the database that will be created by Entity Framework will always be an empty database irrespective of the strategy we chose to initialize the database.

There are many scenarios where we might want to have some values inserted in the database once it is created but before it is used. Master tables and lookup tables are such examples. Also, in some cases, the application deployment wants the data for the administrators to be populated with their default credentials. Or perhaps we want some dummy data in our tables to test how our application behaves in a specific scenario.

Seeding data is very important when we are using the DropCreateDatabaseAlways or DropCreateDatabaseIfModelChanges initialization strategies, since every time we run the application, the database will be recreated (in the...