Question

We have an ASP .NET MVC application that allows users to provide a set of filter criteria that are logically ANDed together. The result of this is to graphically show the user how many items match those criteria. The user can then accept those criteria to create a set of entities in another table.

This is the intuitive and, IMO, sloppy approach:

// where "context" is an EF Context...
foreach (var person in allMatchingPeople) {
    context.MailRequest.Add(new MailRequest {
        Person = person
    });
}

context.SaveChanges();

I don’t like that it’s iterative. If it were SQL I could just do something like:

INSERT INTO MailRequest (PersonId)
SELECT Id
FROM Person
WHERE ... -- filter by criteria provided from user input

Answer 1

In such case use stored procedure EF doesn’t offer such functionality.