Question

Consider the case where i need a ProductPartRecord type and a ManufacturerPartRecord type.
In the fist type i need to know who’s the manufacturer of this part, hence it would be convenient to use a property of type ManufacturerPartRecord.
In the second type i would like to know the products this manufacturer makes, hence it would be convenient to have a property of type IList.

Apparently it is a 1 to many relationship.
Is this a bad practice to put Records in Records and is this even possible, because i’m facing troubles implementing it?

Answer 1

It is possible. And here’s how to do it:

1. In the migrations, add a column to the ProductPartRecord which is of type int and the name should be ManufacturerPartRecord_Id assuming that Id is the name of primary key inside the ManufacturerPartRecord table.
2. Create a foreign key inside the migrations. It should look something like this SchemaBuilder.CreateForeignKey("Product_Manufacturer", "ProductPartRecord", new[] { "ManufacturerPartRecord_Id" }, "ManufacturerPartRecord", new[] { "Id" });
3. Inside the ManufacturerPartRecord model class, you should add a new property which you’ll use for list of products – public virtual IList<ProductPartRecord> ProductPartRecords { get; set; }
4. Inside the ProductPartRecord model class, you should add a new property which you’ll use to get manufacturer – public virtual ManufacturerPartRecord ManufacturerPartRecord { get; set; }

It should be all set now to automatically get manufacturer for you products and vice versa.

If you don’t want this to happen automatically, you should create a service class which will get IRepository<ManufacturerPartRecord> or IRepository<ProductPartRecord> via constructor injection and handle getting and saving lists yourself.