Question

I’m trying to use ASP MVC 4 and Entity Framework 4 to create pretty simple web site.
I need to use the migration feature because I will deploy the application to shared hosting (GoDaddy) and I don’t want to manually change tables on each change.

What is the correct way to model one-to-many relations? Using the other entity type or the other entity’s primary key type?

When I use the other entity type, which is preferred because it keeps the model cleaner, the migration tools worked but the scaffolding of ASP MVC did not. Even when I’ve manually add drop down to select the other entity ASP MVC did not parse the request right and did not set the other entity property.

This is the two options:

Option1: Use other entity type.

 public class Tenant {
    [Key]
    public string TenantID { get; set; }
    public string Name { get; set; }
  }

  public class Survey {
    [Key]
    public string SurveyID { get; set; }

    [Required]
    public Tenant Tenant { get; set; }

    [Required]
    [StringLength(100, MinimumLength=5)]
    public string Title { get; set; }

    [Required]
    public DateTime CreatedAt { get; set; }
  }

Option 2: use primary key type.

  public class Tenant {
    [Key]
    public string TenantID { get; set; }
    public string Name { get; set; }
  }

  public class Survey {
    [Key]
    public string SurveyID { get; set; }

    [Required]
    public string TenantID { get; set; }

    [Required]
    [StringLength(100, MinimumLength=5)]
    public string Title { get; set; }

    [Required]
    public DateTime CreatedAt { get; set; }
  }

I’ve create MVC controller with scaffolding for the Survey entity in my ASP MVC 4 project. It create the CRUD controller and views. In the view it did not put any field for the Tenant.
After I’ve add it myself the method Create(Tenant tenant) was called but the Tenant field that was sent by the HTML form did not get parsed by MVC and did not set the Tenant field of the Survey entity.

Ido

Answer 1

I’ve found this series of posts which explain how to make EF models so that they will work with both EF and ASP MVC.
The idea is to have both “plain” reference type and strong reference type.

public class Team
{
    public int TeamId { get; set; }
    // ... other Team properties go here

    // Each Team has an optional "next opponent" which is another Team
    public int? NextOpponentId { get; set; }
    [ForeignKey("NextOpponentId")] public virtual Team NextOpponent { get; set; }

    // Each Team also has a required Manager and Administrator, both of which are people
    public int ManagerId { get; set; }
    public int AdministratorId { get; set; }
    [ForeignKey("ManagerId")] public virtual Person Manager { get; set; }
    [ForeignKey("AdministratorId")] public virtual Person Administrator { get; set; }
}