Question

Sometimes it’s useful to derive my entities from a base class like this:

public abstract class DestructableBase : IDestructable
{
   /// <summary>
   /// If true, this object should be deleted from the database.
   /// </summary>
   [NotMapped]
   public bool _destroy { get; set; }
}

This allows a web client to mark an entity as needing to be deleted when data is posted back to the server. Obviously I do not wish to record such a property in the database though, so I use the [NotMapped] attribute.

I’ve begun using the fluent API more and more to do my configurations though and would like to stop using data annotations. Is there a way to use the fluent API to do this without having to set Ignore() on every entity individually? Or is there a better way altogether?

Answer 1

You can try to use this class as a base class for your entity configurations:

public class DestructableBaseConfiguration<TEntity> : EntityTypeConfiguration<TEntity>
    where TEntity : DestructableBase
{
    public DestructableEntityConfiguration()
    {
        Ignore(e => e._destroy);
    }
} 

Now every other entity derived from DestructableBase needs entity configuration class derived from DestructableBaseConfiguration. You will register your configurations to modelBuilder in OnModelCreating.