Question

If I have 3 tables:

Customer
CustID
Name
Email

List
ListID
Title

CustomersLists
CustID
ListID

Entity Framework makes it very easy to grab lists of a customer.

db.Customers.FirstOrDefault(c => c.Name == "Bob").Lists

I need save a timestamp of the creation of the relational table so I can see when the customer was added to a list.

I don’t want to add a column ‘timestamp’ to the relational table because it will mess with the intuitive LINQ functionality, as the table CustomersLists appears instead of Customer.Lists.

I have about 12 tables that need to have this timestamp, most of which don’t have many to many relationships. Just fishing to see if anyone has a really good solution I’m overlooking.

Answer 1

Do not map the timestamp in EF mapping. And set the default value for that timestamp column on database layer to: getDate(). It will set it to current “datetime” on insert.