Code-Only best practices

There have been lots of posts on the EFDesign blog talking about how the features in Code Only have evolved.

But very little covering what we think will be the best way to write the code.

You may have seen code like this:

var prodConf = builder.Entity<Product>();
productConf.HasKey(p => p.Id);
productConf.Property(p => p.Id).IsIdentity();
productConf.Property(p => p.Name)
.HasMaxLength(100);
productConf.Relationship(p => p.Category)
.FromProperty(c => c.Products)
.HasConstraint((p,c) => p.CategoryId == c.Id);
productConf.MapSingleType(p =>
new {
Id = p.Id,
Nme = p.Name,
cid = p.CategoryId
})
.ToTable(“dbo.Products”);

And thought that this is what we recommend you write.

Well actually it isn’t.

I’m not making excuses here, but the problem is that sometimes showing best practices gets in the way of explaining features, its so much easier to just show the feature in isolation. 

And there is nothing wrong with that… so long as you go back later and give guidance.

So here goes:

The recommended way to do this is to create classes that derive from EntityConfiguration<TEntity> and put the configuration logic in the constructor like this:

public class ProductConfiguration: EntityConfiguration<Product>
{
public ProductConfiguration()
{
HasKey(p => p.Id);
Property(p => p.Id).IsIdentity();
Property(p => p.Name).HasMaxLength(100);
Relationship(p => p.Category)
.FromProperty(c => c.Products)
.HasConstraint((p,c) => p.CategoryId == c.Id);
MapSingleType(p =>
new {
Id = p.Id,
Nme = p.Name,
cid = p.CategoryId
})
.ToTable(“dbo.Products”);
}
}

Next when you want to use this configuration you simply register it:

builder.Configurations.Add(new ProductConfiguration());
// & repeat for all types you want to configure

This nicely encapsulates the configuration and simplifies the code too.