Question

You can find the source code demonstrating this issue @ http://code.google.com/p/contactsctp5/

I have three model objects. Contact,ContactInfo,ContactInfoType. Where a contact has many contactinfo’s and each contactinfo is a contactinfotype. Fairly simple I guess. The problem I’m running into is when I go to edit the contact object. I pulled it from my contact repository. Then I run “UpdateModel(contact);” and it updates the object with all the values from my form. (monitoring with debug) When I save the changes though, I get the following error:

The operation failed: The relationship
could not be changed because one or
more of the foreign-key properties is
non-nullable. When a change is made to
a relationship, the related
foreign-key property is set to a null
value. If the foreign-key does not
support null values, a new
relationship must be defined, the
foreign-key property must be assigned
another non-null value, or the
unrelated object must be deleted.

It seems like after I call update model it nulls out my references and this seems to break everything? Any thoughts on how to remedy would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Here are my models:

public partial class Contact {
    public Contact() {
      this.ContactInformation = new HashSet<ContactInformation>();
    }

    public int ContactId { get; set; }
    public string FirstName { get; set; }
    public string LastName { get; set; }

    public virtual ICollection<ContactInformation> ContactInformation { get; set; }
 }

 public partial class ContactInformation {
    public int ContactInformationId { get; set; }
    public int ContactId { get; set; }
    public int ContactInfoTypeId { get; set; }
    public string Information { get; set; }

    public virtual Contact Contact { get; set; }
    public virtual ContactInfoType ContactInfoType { get; set; }
  }

  public partial class ContactInfoType {
    public ContactInfoType() {
      this.ContactInformation = new HashSet<ContactInformation>();
    }

    public int ContactInfoTypeId { get; set; }
    public string Type { get; set; }

    public virtual ICollection<ContactInformation> ContactInformation { get; set; }
  }

My Controller Action:

[AcceptVerbs(HttpVerbs.Post)]
    public ActionResult Edit(Contact person) {
      if (this.ModelState.IsValid) {
        var contact = this.contactRepository.GetById(person.ContactId);
        UpdateModel(contact);
        this.contactRepository.Save();
        TempData["message"] = "Contact Saved.";
        return PartialView("Details", contact);
      } else {
        return PartialView(person);
      }
    }

Context Code:

protected override void OnModelCreating(System.Data.Entity.ModelConfiguration.ModelBuilder modelBuilder) {
      modelBuilder.Entity<Contact>()
        .HasMany(c => c.ContactInformation)
        .WithRequired()
        .HasForeignKey(c => c.ContactId);

      modelBuilder.Entity<ContactInfoType>()
        .HasMany(c => c.ContactInformation)
        .WithRequired()
        .HasForeignKey(c => c.ContactInfoTypeId);
    }

Answer 1

I figured this question out thanks to Morteza Manavi on the entity framework website. My issue was caused by my ContactInformation model properties, ‘contactid’ & ‘contacttypeid’ not being nullable. Once I fixed this everything with UpdateModel() worked correctly. Thank you very much!