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Defining a Foreign Key Property

2:59 with James Churchill

Let's see how we can require each comic book to be associated with a series by explicitly adding a foreign key property to the ComicBook entity class.

Follow Along

To follow along commiting your changes to this course, you'll need to fork the dotnet-comic-book-gallery-model repo. Then you can clone, commit, and push your changes to your fork like this: 

git clone <your-fork>
cd dotnet-comic-book-gallery-model
git checkout tags/v3.3 -b defining-foreign-key-property

Foreign Key Property Name Conventions

When generating the in-memory entity data model, EF will will attempt to identify foreign key properties by checking if any of the entity's properties following these naming conventions:

  • {Navigation Property Name}{Principal Primary Key Property Name}
  • {Principal Class Name}{Primary Key Property Name}
  • {Principal Primary Key Property Name}

Let's take another look at the Series_Id foreign key column that 0:00 EF added to the Comic Books table. 0:04 We can see here, that the Series_Id column allows no values. 0:08 For our requirements, we want each comic book to be associated with the series, 0:12 so we need to tell EF to make this column not allow no values. 0:17 To accomplish this, 0:29 we can explicitly add a foreign key property to the comic book entity class. 0:30 SeriesId by following the naming convention of navigation 0:37 property name plus principal primary key property name, 0:43 EF will detect and interpret this property as a foreign key property. 0:47 Furthermore, because we're using a non nullable data type, 0:55 the foreign key table column will not allow nulls. 0:59 If we had a reason to not follow EF standard conventions, 1:02 we can name the foreign key property whatever we like. 1:06 And use the foreign key attribute to associate our foreign key property 1:09 with our navigation property. 1:13 Let's change the foreign key property name. 1:15 And add the foreign key attribute to the series navigation property. 1:19 ForeignKey, then add the using directive for 1:28 the System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations.Sc- 1:32 hema namespace. 1:36 And pass in the name of the ForeignKey property, SeriesRefId. 1:37 Whenever possible, try to follow EF's conventions. 1:45 Doing so, will make your code cleaner and easier to follow. 1:48 That being said, if you're working with an existing database, 1:51 you'll likely need to stick with the column naming convention that has already 1:55 been established in the database. 1:59 When explicitly defining a foreign key property, I like to place it amongst my 2:03 other properties in the order that makes the most sense. 2:07 And place the navigation property just below my other properties. 2:11 I find that organizing my entity class code this way 2:15 helps me to quickly identify the navigation properties. 2:18 Another advantage of having an explicit foreign key property on our entity, 2:22 is that we can now associate a comic book with a series 2:27 by just setting the SeriesId property value. 2:30 We'll see an example of this later in this course. 2:33 Let's run our app one more time and 2:36 verify that the comic books' SeriesId column is added and configured correctly. 2:39 And here's our new SeriesId column which no longer allows null values. 2:53

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