Entity Framework table inheritance

Question

I have the following 2 tables TableA and ArchivedTableA. Basically They are identical tables, but rows from TableA are moved to ArchivedTable to archive them.

How can I represent this in entity Framework so that these 2 classes inherit from the same entity. I am using POCOs.

ckal · Accepted Answer · 2012-11-21 17:10:27Z

1

I would recommend not using inheritance in this situation. If you were to "archive" a record from TableA to ArchiveTableA it would still be in your base table.

Julie Lerman has a good MSDN article of some of the pitfalls of inheritance. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/jj553510.aspx

answered Nov 21, 2012 at 17:10

ckal

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activebiz · Accepted Answer · 2012-11-21 16:50:28Z

0

I would create a base class with common properties for e.g.

     public class BaseEntity
    {
         public virtual int Id {get;set;}
         public DateTime CreatedOn  {get;set;}
    }

Then create POCO objects which inherit from this base class becouse they have common columns as follows ....

public class TableA : BaseEntity
{
   public string NewName {get;set;}
}

public class ArchivedTableA : BaseEntity
{
   public string Name {get;set;}
}

You obviously needs to do the DbSet Mapping etc in form of EF plumbing on top of this...

answered Nov 21, 2012 at 16:50

activebiz

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3 Comments

Joseph Caruana Over a year ago

Do you mean to remove the T4 generation?

activebiz Over a year ago

Not necessarily. T4 templates are just "Moulds" to generate your EF classes. You can create your own custom T4 templates which uses the inheritance modal as above. For start I would write all the classes by hand once you are happy with your object model then create your T4 templates from that object model.

Joseph Caruana Over a year ago

thanks again for your reply. so it seems that out of the box, there is no one to achive this? - you would need to create your own T4 generation - right?

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