I have a challenging problem where I would like to use reflection on my Entity Framework mapping to find all the foreign keys that reference a table, and I want the names of the columns that are the foreign keys.
According to another post on SO, I can easily find the navigation properties on a table through reflection. But this doesn’t give me the name of the property or column that contains the foreign key value.
The reason I’m trying to do this is that I have a large number of tables (nearly 40) that reference one table of items. Let’s say a user enters a new value in the items table called “Andew” and later an admin notices it’s actually just a typo for the already-existing item “Andrew”. Now I want to find all references to “Andew” and change those references to “Andrew”. I would prefer to do this effeciently, so using the reverse-navigation properties would be too slow since you have to load the values before modifying them. What I would like to do is be able to reflect a list of tables and columns, then issue update commands directly to the database. It would look something like this:
var command = String.Format("UPDATE [{0}] SET [{1}] = {{1}} WHERE [{1}] = {{0}}; ", fk.FromTableName, fk.FromColumnName);
dataContext.ExecuteStoreCommand(command, new Object[] { oldID, newID });
In LINQ to SQL this was actually pretty easy… 20 lines of reflection on the LINQ auto-generated code and I was done, but we switched to EF recently and I can’t find the names of the foreign key columns through EF.
A simplified example of what I’m looking for: if I have an object called Employee with a navigation property called Manager and a foreign key of ManagerID, then I want to know that Manager is my navigation property and the underlying storage is the ManagerID property. I want to do this strictly through reflection or metadata so I can build a dynmaic query from it.
The answer to the question is in another post here: Read foreign key metadata programatically with Entity Framework 4
Note the poster’s answer didn’t work for me. Use @Ashraf’s answer, which worked great.