Question

I have read many posts about how to specify the foreign key name in relationships, no problems there. What I would like to know though, is there a way to change how the primary keys and relationships are named?

For instance, you have a User table with UserId as the primary key. The primary key is called PK_User_1788CC4C07020F21 (or something like that) by the EF code first database generation. Or you have a reference from your User table to your UserVersion table and that is called UserVersion_User by EF. I would like to have the primary key called something like PK_User and the foreign reference something like FK_UserVersion_User.

Is there a way to do this? Some convention override or actually being able to specify the text?

Thanks.

Update:
Based on the answer and link bellow I did the following in my Seed method. It’s kinda brute force, but I recon that it can be refined, especially if you create the fluent entity type configuration files etc with a generator. The same could be done for the foreign key reference names.

    protected override void Seed(TodoDataContext context)
    {
        FixIndexes(context, "User");
        FixIndexes(context, "UserStats");
        FixIndexes(context, "UserRole");
        FixIndexes(context, "UserVersion");
        FixIndexes(context, "UserUserRoleVersion");
    }

    private void FixIndexes(TodoDataContext context, string tableName)
    {
        const string renamePrimaryKeySql = @"
            DECLARE @TableName NVARCHAR(128)
            DECLARE @IndexName NVARCHAR(128)
            DECLARE @OldName NVARCHAR(128)
            DECLARE @NewName NVARCHAR(128)
            SELECT  @TableName = '{0}'

            SELECT  @IndexName = C.CONSTRAINT_NAME
            FROM    INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLE_CONSTRAINTS PK ,INFORMATION_SCHEMA.KEY_COLUMN_USAGE C
            WHERE   pk.TABLE_NAME = @TableName
              AND   CONSTRAINT_TYPE = 'PRIMARY KEY'
              AND   C.TABLE_NAME = PK.TABLE_NAME
              AND   C.CONSTRAINT_NAME = PK.CONSTRAINT_NAME

            SELECT  @OldName = @TableName + '.' + @IndexName
            SELECT  @NewName = 'PK_' + @TableName

            exec sp_rename @OldName, @NewName, 'INDEX'";

        context.Database.ExecuteSqlCommand(string.Format(renamePrimaryKeySql, tableName));

Answer 1

No there is no way to change these names unless you manually drop them in custom initializer and create them again. EF doesn’t have pluggable conventions so you cannot override them.