Question

I’m probably thinking about this all wrong but I have the following db tables:

When I run the EF Wizard in VS2008 I get the following model:

You’ll notice that in the EF model shows that the Entity has no field for EntityTypeID or EntityStatusId. Instead it shows it as a navigation property, so the field appears to not be addressable when I instantiate an Entity (pardon the terminology confusion: Entity is a Table/Class in my name space not in the EF namespace). How can I assign an EntityTypeID and StatusTypeID when instantiating an Entity?

Answer 1

Yes, the entity framework hides foreign key ID properties and shows navigation properties instead. There is a lengthy discussion about why it does that, here. The usual means of assigning a reference to another entity is to assign the entity instance, rather than the foreign key ID value, like this:

var foo = new Entity(); var status = (from .... select ...).FirstOrDefault(); foo.StatusCodes = status; 

However, it is possible to assign a foreign key ID directly, if you happen to know what it is:

foo.StatusCodesReference = new EntityKey(    'MyEntityContextName.StatusCodesEntitySetName', 'StatusCodeId', value); 

Obviously, substitute the real values in the above.