Question

I want to implement a base class for my entities, so I don’t have to define a Guid Id field in each entitiy. I have created the following base class:

public abstract class IdableEntity
    {
        [Key]
        public Guid Id { get; set; }

        protected IdableEntity()
        {
            Id = Guid.NewGuid();
        }
    }

This is done becuase as far as I know I can just use [DatabaseGenerated…] attribute in this case, since I would have to go to a database and alter all the table’s ID field to have (newid()) call as an “initializer”. This is very inconvenient if one has many entity classes – therefore many tables.

But now, I will have to decleare a constructor with a call to base constructor in each child class, right? If so, does it even worth it?

Answer 1

If you use your code the way it is, all you’ll need to do is this:

public class ChildEntity : IdableEntity
{
    // ...
}

When you create instances of the ChildEntity class, the protected base IdableEntity constructor will automatically be called because it takes no parameters.