Thursday, 1 March 2012

Entity Framework and Database


By default, when you use Entity Framework Code First to automatically create a database, as you did earlier in this tutorial, Code First adds a table to the database to help track whether the schema of the database is in sync with the model classes it was generated from. If they aren't in sync, the Entity Framework throws an error. This makes it easier to track down issues at development time that you might otherwise only find (by obscure errors) at run time. The sync-checking feature is what causes the error message to be displayed that you just saw.

There are two approaches to resolving the error:
  1. Have the Entity Framework automatically drop and re-create the database based on the new model class schema. This approach is very convenient when doing active development on a test database, because it allows you to quickly evolve the model and database schema together. The downside, though, is that you lose existing data in the database — so you don't want to use this approach on a production database!
  2. Explicitly modify the schema of the existing database so that it matches the model classes. The advantage of this approach is that you keep your data. You can make this change either manually or by creating a database change script. 

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