Question

I have a database that consists in keeping calendars, those calendars are spread out in several tables that uses FK to each tables…

Everything works but now I want to be able to say

Create a new calendar with all it’s features based on calendar Id: 62

I was trying one way but it’s terrible, witch is going through all my repository Update area and fire each onde that will create new content on each table…

Is there a faster Solution?

A way that we could simply say

db.Entity<Calendar>(CalendarId).CloneAsNew();

so I would end up with :

[Table Calendars]
calendar_id    Name    Url
62             Cal_A   url_A
74             Cal_A   url_A

[Table CalendarContents]
content_id   calendar_id  type   img_background    img_top
14           62           1      bkg.png           top.png
26           74           1      bkg.png           top.png

having only one calendar before, as

[Table Calendars]
calendar_id    Name    Url
14             Cal_A   url_A

[Table CalendarContents]
content_id   calendar_id  type   img_background    img_top
14           62           1      bkg.png           top.png

---

P.S. If you detach and attach it again like

context.Detach(entity);
entityCollection.Add(entity);

we loose all references :-/

Answer 1

EF doesn’t provide any way to clone entity graph. At this time you have to general solutions:

• Create stored procedure to clone your calendar, map it as function import and use it for cloning and retrieving Id of new calendar. Once you have an Id execute new query to load whole entity graph for the new calendar.
• Get entity graph for the whole old calendar and create deep clone (you must serialize the entity graph to the stream and deserialize it back to a new entity graph). Add new entity graph to the context and save changes. It should insert all entities in the new graph.