Question

I have run into an interesting problem with Entity Framework and based on the code I had to use to tackle it I suspect my solution is less than ideal. I have a 1-to-Many relationship between Table A and Table B where entities in TableB have a reference to TableA. I have a scenario where I want to simultaneously delete all children of a row in TableA and I thought this could be achieve by simply clearing the collection:

Entity.Children.Clear()

Unfortunately, when I attempted to save changes this produced as a Foreign Key violation.

A relationship is being added or
deleted from an AssociationSet
‘FK_EntityB_EntityA’. With cardinality
constraints, a corresponding ‘EntityB’
must also be added or deleted.

The solution I came up with was to manually delete object via the entity context’s DeleteObject(), but I just know this logic I am using has got to be wrong.

while (collection.Any())
    Entities.DeleteObject(collection.First());

For one, the fact that I had to use a Where() loop seems far less than ideal, but I suppose that’s purely a semantic assessment on my part. In any case, is there something wrong with how I am doing this, or is there perhaps a better way to clear a child entity collection of an entity such that Entity Framework properly calls a data store delete on all of the removed objects?

Answer 1

Clear() removes the reference to the entity, not the entity itself.

If you intend this to be always the same operation, you could handle AssociationChanged:

Entity.Children.AssociationChanged += 
    new CollectionChangeEventHandler(EntityChildrenChanged);
Entity.Children.Clear();            

    private void EntityChildrenChanged(object sender,
        CollectionChangeEventArgs e)
    {
        // Check for a related reference being removed. 
        if (e.Action == CollectionChangeAction.Remove)
        {
            Context.DeleteObject(e.Element);
        }
    }

You can build this in to your entity using a partial class.