I'm building a fairly simple MVC project and still getting my head around where to use navigation properties and foreign keys with code first.
This is the main model class:
public class GroceryItem
{
public int ID { get; set; }
public string Name { get; set; }
public GroceryCategory Category { get; set; }
public QualityProfile Quality { get; set; }
public GroceryStore BestStore { get; set; }
public double BestPrice { get; set; }
public double LastSeenPrice { get; set; }
//Navigation Properties
public virtual ICollection<GroceryItem> SimilarItems { get; set; }
}
and these are the relating classes:
public class GroceryStore
{
public int ID { get; set; }
public string Name { get; set; }
public string Address { get; set; }
public Uri Website { get; set; }
}
public class QualityProfile
{
public int ID { get; set; }
public string Name { get; set; }
public string Description { get; set; }
/// <summary>
/// Rank out of 1-10, 10 being the best
/// </summary>
public byte Ranking { get; set; }
}
public class GroceryCategory
{
public int ID { get; set; }
public string Name { get; set; }
public string Description { get; set; }
}
Which brings me to my question, is the navigation property of SimilarItems I have in the GroceryItem class sufficient to represent a list of multiple grocery items or does this not work as it is referring to itself?
Additionally...do the Category, Quality and BestStore properties require ID properties to represent a foreign key inside of the GroceryItem class (e.g. CategoryID), or is the way I have this represented OK?
----EDIT----
--Refactored Code--
I've re-factored my model based on the suggestions below, which I think better accommodates the suggestions you've made (yes a 2nd time), realised my model was a little flawed and extracted out the price component into a separate purchases Model.
public class GroceryItem
{
public int ID { get; set; }
public string Name { get; set; }
[ForeignKey("Category")]
public int CategoryID { get; set; }
[ForeignKey("Quality")]
public int QualityID { get; set; }
//Navigation Properties
public virtual QualityProfile Quality { get; set; }
public virtual GroceryCategory Category { get; set; }
}
However the last thing I'm uncertain about which is on topic to this post, is if I have a collection as a part of the model (one that does not reference itself like in the first example), can I just represent that with a navigation property or does an extra step need to be taken?
Ie. If I was to allow multiple different categories on a GroceryItem, instead of looking like this:
[ForeignKey("Category")]
public int CategoryID { get; set; }
public virtual GroceryCategory Category { get; set; }
it would look like this:
public virtual ICollection<GroceryCategory> Categories { get; set; }
The best answer to your question(s) is, "It depends". Navigation properties are one way of informing Entity Framework that there's a relationship between entities. By convention, if you have a navigation property such as:
public Category Category { get; set; }
Entity Framework will create a column on the table named in the form of [RelatedPropertyName]_[RelatedPK]. Given your classes, the property above would cause a column named Category_ID. There's nothing more you need to do make it work. The relationship will automatically be handled by EF.
However, doing it this way, you won't have access to this foreign key property. It's not exposed in the public API of your entity. Often, especially when selecting related items from a select list and similar such scenarios, this becomes problematic, as you must store the selected value some place else, usually a property on a view model, and then use this to query the related thing from the database before setting it on the entity it belongs to and finally saving the entity. Whereas, with an actual foreign key property, you can simply post directly back to this and Entity Framework will automatically wire up the related entity. As a result, I tend to always follow the following pattern with my navigation properties:
public int FooId { get; set; }
public virtual Foo Foo { get; set; }
In most scenarios, Entity Framework will automatically connect those two, such that FooId will hold the foreign key relationship for the Foo navigation property. However, occasionally, EF will trip up and try to create the implicit foreign key behind the scenes, still, but you can correct that behavior by explicitly telling EF that this is the foreign key:
[ForeignKey("Foo")]
public int FooId { get; set; }
Roughly the same applies with collection navigation properties. EF will see this as an indication that there's a one-to-many relationship in play and add the implicit foreign key on the opposite entity. Given your collection:
public virtual ICollection<GroceryItem> SimilarItems { get; set; }
The opposite entity is actually the same entity, which presents an interesting use case. Typically, EF would handle this by assuming there's a one-to-many relationship. You'd end up with a column named GroceryItem_ID on your dbo.GroceryItems table. Here, though, you would not only have no access to the foreign key directly, but you also have no public API for accessing the parent GroceryItem either. That may not be a problem, but it's something to be aware of. The only way you'd be able to manage the relationship is through the collection on the parent, not through a child item in that collection.
However, since this is self-referential and you have not specify a foreign key or instance navigation property, all EF will see is a collection on both sides of the relationship, so my guess is that you'll actually end up with an M2M with an intermediary table. I can't test that theory out myself at the moment, and I haven't tried this particular scenario myself previously.
To create a true one-to-many, you would need to create another navigation property similar to:
public virtual GroceryItem ParentGroceryItem { get; set; }
And, even, then, I don't think EF will get the point without a little Fluent configuration:
HasMany(m => m.SimilarItems).WithOptional(m => m.ParentGroceryItem);
You could also use WithRequired in other scenarios instead of WithOptional, which would obviously make the relationship a required one, but since this is self-referential, it's impossible to have it required, because there will have to be at least one root node with no parent.
Related
What is the difference between foreign key reference using Id vs object.
For example:
FK relation using Id
class Product
{
public int Id { get; set; }
public string Name { get; set; }
public string PhoneNumber { get; set; }
public int CategoryId { get; set; }
}
vs
FK relation using object
class Product
{
public int Id { get; set; }
public string Name { get; set; }
public string PhoneNumber { get; set; }
public Category Category { get; set; }
}
I have noticed from database that by using Id property the column essentially becomes non-null field.
Is that the only difference?
I think we can't query multiple tables at once i.e.querying related data?
When should I choose to use either options?
In your first example you're not adding a relationship, just an integer property named CategoryId.
In your second example, Entity Framework will create an integer column named "Category_ID", but you will be not be able to see this property in your model, so I like to explicitly add it my self and be able to use it along with the navigation property.
class Product
{
public int Id { get; set; }
public string Name { get; set; }
public string PhoneNumber { get; set; }
[ForeignKey("Category")]
public int CategoryId { get; set; }
public Category Category{get;set;}
}
This way you can also control the data type of CategoryId, so you could make it optional (nullable)
public int? CategoryId { get; set; }
*The foreign key data annotation is not needed, unless you have property or navigation property names that do not follow the naming convention for foreign key property names (Bardr), it doesn't harm to explicitly declare it either for clarity purposes
This implies that you're creating a 1 to many relationship (1-*) with products and categories, so in your Category class you would be adding a collection navigation property for products
class Category
{
public int Id{ get; set;}
public string Name{ get; set; }
...
public ICollection<Product> Products{get; set;}
}
Basically it depends on your use case and what type of loading related data you choose. Whether you use Id or object reference or full relationship on both sides (Id and object) it depends on your overall application architecture. If you wil go and use full or object reference everywhere, you will (probably) end up with a mess, and you won't know whether you should query for some entities using their repository or if it'll be okay to include them to some other query. I highly recommend you to take a look at this book, especially chapter 19 (Aggregates) and 21 (Repositories). There you have an in-depth explanation of what I meant and much more. (This does not only apply to applications built in DDD way)
I'm a bit confused by conflicting examples of one-to-many model relationships using EF that I'm seeing online.
One video I watched setup a relationship between tables like so:
public class CustomerType
{
public int Id { get; set; }
public string Name { get; set; }
}
public class Customer
{
public int Id { get; set; }
public string Name { get; set; }
public int CustomerTypeId { get; set; }
public CustomerType CustomerType { get; set; }
}
So a Customer can only have one CustomerType, but a CustomerType can be used by many Customers. This code works fine, I can fetch a Customer's CustomerType with LINQ using Include.
Now I'm looking at another resource showing the same kind of relationship:
public partial class Standard
{
public int StandardId { get; set; }
public string StandardName { get; set; }
public virtual ICollection<Teacher> Teachers { get; set; }
}
public partial class Teacher
{
public int TeacherId { get; set; }
public string TeacherName { get; set; }
public Nullable<int> StandardId { get; set; }
public virtual Standard Standard { get; set; }
}
This looks almost the same, except:
In this example, the Standard class (equivalent to my CustomerType) has a navigation property back to a collection of Teachers, which my first example does not have. Is this just convenient to have if I want to get a list of all teachers for a given standard, or is it necessary to properly set up the relationship?
The properties in the second example are marked virtual and the first are not -- it seems that best practice is to make nav properties virtual, but is there a reason you wouldn't want to do that?
If it matters, I'm using MVC5 and EF6 and I just want to know if one example is right and one is wrong, or just two styles of getting to the same place.
Thanks!
The navigational properties are to make queries easier for the programmer. Your examples are basically the same with the difference that in Standard you can access Teachers through query while in CustomerType you can not access Customers with this CustomerType because you do not have it as a navigational property. Nevertheless, you can always include List<Customer> Customers in Customer Type.
Also it is better to add virtual to your navigational property for the sake of lazy loading.
MSDN
It depends on your needs, if you will never have to get the navigation property and just need a foreign key for sake of data integrity then you can simply add an integer and mark it as a foreign key. ex: instead of having a CustomerType instance, you can simply have a CustomerTypeId and that is it.
As for the virtual keyword, you can add it if you want to have a lazy loading enabled in your DBContext, cause EF generates proxy classes that inherits from your model classes and it overrides the virtual properties to add the needed logic to lazy load the navigation properties.
If you have a lazy loading disabled, then no need to mark any property as virtual
I got a problem on Foreign Keys.
What I want is that for every Video Model there is a Profile Model link to it
An example of that would look like this:
public class VideoModels
{
[Required]
public int Id { get; set; }
public ProfileModels Profile { get; set; }
}
While in the ProfileModels
public class ProfileModels
{
[Required]
public int Id { get; set; }
public string Title { get; set; }
}
Which technically should not have any connection with VideoModels for the VideoModels is dependent with ProfileModels and there can be 0 to many relationship.
So after that I tested it, my VideoModels has a Profile_Id parameter which is a foreign key from ProfileModels
But after creating an object and retrieving it, it returns NULL but when I check the database there is an existing Foreign Key Id.
Please help, stuck here for hours now
Profile would be null here due to LazyLoading. This allows us to have an object with many different objects that are only loaded when needed rather than loaded when a parent object is loaded. This is especially helpful if you have something like a Comments property as part of the user. Without LazyLoading the comments collection would be loaded whenever you wanted to grab just the VideoModels.ID. A downside to LazyLoading is that each navigation performed requires a separate query to the data source.
To allow for LazyLoading you need to mark related object properties as virtual.
In addition you must supply a navigation property in your context:
public class Database : DbContext {
public DbSet<VideoModels> People { get; set; }
public DbSet<ProfileModels> PersonDetails { get; set; }
}
Or
If you want to use your current class modeling, you can achieve this by disabling LazyLoading.
this.Configuration.LazyLoadingEnabled = false;
Nevermind, I just forgot to make the foreign key propery as virtual.
public class VideoModels
{
[Required]
public int Id { get; set; }
public virtual ProfileModels Profile { get; set; }
}
I have entities:
[Table("Currency")]
public class Currency
{
[Key]
public int CurrencyId { get; set; }
public string Name { get; set; }
public char Symbol { get; set; }
}
[Table("Invoice")]
public class Invoice
{
[Key]
public int InvoiceId { get; set; }
public int CurrencyId { get; set; }
public int Amount { get; set; }
// public virtual ICollection<Currency> CurrencyList { get; set; }
}
I need every invoice to contain all possible currencies that are in the database. If I just set navigation property as in the commented line, then the system tries to implicitly create its own foreign key constraint that doesnt actually exists and then gives an error.
Is there a way to make that navigational prop with no FK?
I don't believe a navigation property is what you're looking for. this msdn article discusses navigation properties more in depth, http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/vstudio/bb738520(v=vs.100).aspx
Every object can have a navigation property for every relationship in which it participates.
this sentence specifically and the two sections Modifying Relationships and Navigating Relationships point more to the fact that these properties are specifically for EF relationships, if there is no relationship between the two objects there likely shouldn't be a navigation property.
#carlosfiguira has a good idea about a helper class, which i agree with. but hearing your issues with adding helper code to your CodeFirst models.
My suggestion would be to create a composite model that has an invoice property and the list of currencies. I've done this before especially in Web patterns, that type of complex object might be called a ViewModel depending on use case.
I create a model in EF6 that contains several tables one of my tables is ContentGrouptable with this structure :
public partial class ContentGroup
{
public ContentGroup()
{
this.Contents = new HashSet<Content>();
this.ContentGroups = new HashSet<ContentGroup>();
}
public int Id { get; set; }
public string Name { get; set; }
public string Visible { get; set; }
public long Ordering { get; set; }
public string CommentState { get; set; }
public int ContentGroupId { get; set; }
public virtual ICollection<Content> Contents { get; set; }
public virtual ICollection<ContentGroup> ContentGroups { get; set; }
public virtual ContentGroup ContentGroup1 { get; set; }
}
As you can see this table has a relation whit itself .One to many on Id column.It this table we have a FK-ContentGroupId that refers to itself(ContentGroup).So i create a view for this entity using MVC4(ASP) so when i want to insert a value to my table i got this error:
"Unable to determine a valid ordering for dependent operations. Dependencies may
exist due to foreign key constraints, model requirements, or store-generated
values."
So what should i do ?it because of FK?
Best regards
The problem is that you have a non-nullable ContentGroupId. This means that when you insert a ContentGroup, you have to set its parent ContentGroup as well. But this a chicken and egg problem (or: no "valid ordering"). You can't insert a parent and child at the same time, it's always a sequential operation. And then, there must always be a "mother of all parents", not having a parent itself.
So, make ContentGroupId nullable and map the associations like so:
modelBuilder.Entity<ContentGroup>()
.HasOptional(cg => cg.ContentGroup1)
.WithMany(cg => cg.ContentGroups)
.HasForeignKey(cg => cg.ContentGroupId);