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Many-to-many Relationship
Earlier in Entity Framework, the many-to-many relationship was classified as two one-to-many relationships. To make it work the developer must create a joining entity class.
Now in Entity Framework Core 5.0, it will have full support for many-to-many relations without explicitly mapping the join table.
- The navigation properties skip the join table and directly point to the other entity.
- It will result in writing cleaner queries and simplify the use of the query result.
Let's consider the following model.
public class Movie
{
public int MovieId { get; set; }
public string Name{ get; set; }
public Actor Actor { get; set; }
public List<Genre> Genres { get; set; }
}
public class Genre
{
public int GenreId { get; set; }
public string GenreName { get; set; }
public List<Movie> Movies{ get; set; }
}
As you can see that
Movie class contains a collection of Genres, and Genre class contains a collection of Movies. EF Core 5.0 recognizes this as a many-to-many relationship by convention and there is no need for configuration in OnModelCreating.public class MyEntityContext : DbContext
{
protected override void OnConfiguring(DbContextOptionsBuilder opBuilder)
{
opBuilder.UseSqlServer("Data Source=(localdb)\\ProjectsV13;Initial Catalog=MyContextDB;");
}
public DbSet<Movie> Movies { get; set; }
public DbSet<Genre> Genres { get; set; }
}
When you create migration or call the
EnsureCreatedmethod, it will create the following tables including the join table.CREATE TABLE [dbo].[Movies] (
[MovieId] INT IDENTITY (1, 1) NOT NULL,
[Name] NVARCHAR (MAX) NULL,
CONSTRAINT [PK_Movies] PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED ([MovieId] ASC)
);
CREATE TABLE [dbo].[Genres] (
[GenreId] INT IDENTITY (1, 1) NOT NULL,
[GenreName] NVARCHAR (MAX) NULL,
CONSTRAINT [PK_Genres] PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED ([GenreId] ASC)
);
CREATE TABLE [dbo].[GenreMovie] (
[GenresGenreId] INT NOT NULL,
[MoviesMovieId] INT NOT NULL,
CONSTRAINT [PK_GenreMovie] PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED ([GenresGenreId] ASC, [MoviesMovieId] ASC),
CONSTRAINT [FK_GenreMovie_Genres_GenresGenreId] FOREIGN KEY ([GenresGenreId]) REFERENCES [dbo].[Genres] ([GenreId]) ON DELETE CASCADE,
CONSTRAINT [FK_GenreMovie_Movies_MoviesMovieId] FOREIGN KEY ([MoviesMovieId]) REFERENCES [dbo].[Movies] ([MovieId]) ON DELETE CASCADE
);
Let's insert some movies and genres.
using (var context = new MyEntityContext())
{
context.Database.EnsureCreated();
var comedy = new Genre() { GenreName = "Comedy" };
var action = new Genre() { GenreName = "Action" };
var horror = new Genre() { GenreName = "Horror" };
var scifi = new Genre() { GenreName = "Sci-fi" };
context.AddRange(
new Movie() { Name = "Avengers", Genres = new List<Genre>() { action, scifi } },
new Movie() { Name = "Satanic Panic", Genres = new List<Genre>() { comedy, horror } });
context.SaveChanges();
}
EF will then automatically create rows in the join table.
Last modified 1mo ago