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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-28T00:00:07+00:00

I have a simple architectural question and would love some advice. I am trying

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I have a simple architectural question and would love some advice.

I am trying to get familiar with ASP.NET MVC 3. To do so I am coding a small TV Shows gallery as an exercise.

My Models folder holds several classes, including a TvShow, a Season and an Episode class. Those are naturally tied together: a TvShow instance has a one-to-many relationship with Season instances while a Season instance has a one-to-many relationship with Episode instances.

Using ASP.NET’s Entity Framework, how should I model these one-to-many relationships ? I see 2 options:

  • Option 1 – The TvShow class has a List<Season> seasons field
  • Option 2 – The Season class has a TvShow tvShow field

Option 2 seems more natural to me because it mimics the underlying database design. It is also the choice made by Microsoft in their MvcMusicStore tutorial. However, I’m wondering if there is a reason to reject Option 1 – either for database / EF related matters or for OO-design matters.

Thoughts?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Option 1 and Option 2 are actually compatible 😉 With Entity Framework, there’s something called navigation properties that allows to have both in case of a one-to-many association.

    TvShow will have a navigation property that contains the list of Seasons, and Season will have a navigation property that contains the associated TvShow.

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