Question

I am pretty new to c#, EF Code First and all that, so my question might be an easy one.

I am trying to create a very simple login. Each user must have a type (admin or client). How can I bind the usertype to my user table without generating a new type each time I insert a new user in the DB?
Here are my code first class:

public class User
{
    public int Id { get; set; }
    public string Username { get; set; }
    public string Password { get; set; }
    public bool Active { get; set; }
    public UserType TypeId { get; set; }
}

public class UserType
{
    public int Id { get; set; }
    public string Type { get; set; }
}

public enum TypeEnum
{
    Admin,
    Client
}

When I launch the app, I want to be able to create 2 tables:

• Users which is empty
• UserTypes which must contain 2 types (Admin and Client).

Then, everytime I register a new user, so everytime I add a user to the Users table, I want to be able to use the UserTypes table.

Answer 1

When I launch the app, I want to be able to create 2 tables…

Not sure if I understand this correctly but you can seed initial data into the database with EF Code-First. An example how to do that is here:

Entity Framework Inserting Initial Data On Rebuild

If you really want to recreate the tables with every launch of your application you can use the DropCreateDatabaseAlways<T> initializer as mentioned in the example.

Then, everytime I register a new user, so everytime I add a user to
the Users table, I want to be able to use the UserTypes table.

For this you would load the existing UserType you want to assign from the database so that it is attached to the context and then create the new user:

using (var context = new MyContext())
{
    var userType = context.UserTypes
        .Single(u => u.Type == TypeEnum.Admin.ToString());
    var newUser = new User { TypeId = userType, Username = ... etc. };

    context.Users.Add(newUser);

    context.SaveChanges();
}

Attaching to the context – by either loading from the database or calling Attach explicitely – makes sure that the UserType is not duplicated, i.e. no INSERT command will be sent to the database for the UserType.