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

Managing Entity relationships using the Code First approach


Now that we know how to define simple domain classes using the Code First approach, and we can use the DbContext class to perform the database operations using the domain classes, let's see how we can implement database multiplicity relationships using these domain classes. We will see how to implement the following types of relationships, using Entity Framework Code First:

  • One-to-many relationship

  • One-to-one relationship

  • Many-to-many relationship

We will also take a look at the various ways in which these relationships can be implemented, such as using Entity Framework conventions, data annotations, and fluent API for these configurations.

Implementing one-to-many relationships

To configure a one-to-many relationship in the database, we can either rely on Entity Framework conventions, or we can use the data annotations/fluent API-based configurations to explicitly create the relationship. Let's say we have to create a one-to-many relationship...