The comic book to series relationship is not the only relationship that

we need to define in our model.

Each comic book could also be associated with one or

more artists and each artist can be associated with one or more comic books.

This kind of relationship is known as a many to many relationship.

Let's add an artist entity to our model and

define the relationship between the comic book and artist entities.

Right click on the model's folder and select Add Class.

Name the class, artist and click Add.

Add the Public Access modifier and the following properties.

An int property named Id.

Like our other entities, this property will contain a unique value for

each artist in our system.

A string property named Name.

This is the artist's name.

Now that we have the artist class,

let's define the many to many relationship between the comic book and artist Indies.

While we're here we can start by adding a collection of comic books to our

artist class.

Public, Icollection of type comic book,

comic books and we'll add a default constructor so

that we can initialize the comic books collection property.

Public Artist ComicBooks =

new List of .

Now let's add a collection of artists

to the comic book entity class.

Public I collection of type artist ,artists and

a default constructor to initialize

the artist collection property public

comic book artists = new list of artist.

By adding the comic books navigation collection property to the artist entity

class in the artist navigation collection property to the comic book entity class,

we've defined a many to many relationship between the comic book and

artist entities.

Each comic book instance can be associated with one or more artist instances.

And each artist instance can be associated with one or more comic book instances.

With our new artist entity and artist to comic books many to many

relationship in place, we can update our test data to make use of these changes.

Let's start with adding a second series.

I'll copy and paste this code,

change the series variables to series one and series two,

and set the title of the second series to The Invincible Iron Man.

Then let's define some artist's,

var artist1 = new Artist, name = Stan Lee.

Var artist2 = new artist,

name = Steve Ditko.

And var artist 3,

= new artist,

name = Jack Kirby.

We need to assign our comic book entity objects to their own variables so

we can call the add method on the comic book's artist collection property.

Let's cut this comic book and the object instantiation code,

And paste it to the right of var comicBook 1.

Remember that we renamed a series variable to series 1.

So let's replace the reference to the old variable with a new variable.

Now let's add our first two artists, Stan Lee and Steve Ditko,

to this comic book comicBook1.Artists.Add(artist1);.

And comicBook1.Artists.Add(artist2);.

Now repeat that process for the second comic book.

Cut the comic book entity object instantiation code and

paste it to the right of var comicBook2,

rename the series variable to series1, and

add our first two artists to this comic book.

While we're at it let's add a third comic book,

var comicBook3 = new ComicBook.

I'll set the series property to our second series.

The issue number to one and publishedOn to DateTime.Today.

For this comic book let's add our first and third artists.

Let's fix our comic books db set property add method calls by passing in

the variables comicBook1 and comicBook2.

And don't forget that we added a third comic book.

So, we need to add a third call to the comic books db set add method.

Context.ComicBooks.add(comicBooks3).

Now that we've updated our test data.

Let's update our comic books query to include our artist data.

To do that we need to use an include method call, just like we did when

including the series data .include cb goes to cb.artists.

Let's update our output to include a list of each comic book's artist.

I'll use a link query to transform the collection

of artist entity objects to a collection of artistNames,

var artistNames = ComicBook.Artists.Select(

a => a.Name).ToList();.

Then I'll use the strings join method to transform the collection of

strings into a comma delimited list.

Var artistsDisplayext = string.join,

the first parameter is the string to use as

the separator that goes in between each value.

Let's use a comma followed by a space.

The second parameter is the collection of values to join.

Artist names,

now I'll write that value to the console using the console right line method.

Console WriteLine (artistsDisplayText).

With those changes in place, let's test our app.

And here's our three comic books along with their respective artists.

The Amazing Spider-Man number one, Stan Lee, Steve Ditko,

The Amazing Spider-Man number two.

Again with Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, and

the Invincible Iron Man number one with Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.

Now let's review the database that EF generated for

us using the SQL server opted explorer window.

There are two new tables artist comic books and artists.

The artist table is exactly what we'd expect it to be.

It contains columns for each of our artist entitiy class

properties ID and name.

The artist comicbooks table contains two columns artist ID and comic book ID.

Interestingly this table doesn't have a corresponding indie class in our model.

EF automatically added this table to the database

in order to store the artist to kind books many to many relationship data.

This table is known by a variety of names including junction,

join, linking, mapping, or bridge.

Let's review the tables data.

We can sort the data to make it easier to review.

Click the sort and filter dataset tool bar icon and

set the sort for both columns to ascending.

Then click OK.

Now we can see that artist ID 1 is associated with

comic book I.D.'s 1, 2 and 3.

And artist ID 2 is associated with comic book I.D.'s 1 and 2.

And artist ID 3 is associated with comic book ID 3.