Difference between .WithMany() and .WithOptional()?
Below are two similar fluent API configurations:
WithMany()
modelBuilder.Entity<Country>()
.HasRequired(cou => cou.Currency)
.WithMany()
.WillCascadeOnDelete(false);
WithOptional()
modelBuilder.Entity<Country>()
.HasR开发者_JAVA百科equired(cou => cou.Currency)
.WithOptional()
.WillCascadeOnDelete(false);
What I am trying to express here is: Every Country
requires a concrete Currency
, but a Currency
can be assigned to zero, one or many Countries.
Which of the above statements would I have to use? Or in other words: What exactly is the difference between .WithMany()
and .WithOptional()
operators?
If your model would look like this:
public class Country
{
public int CountryId { get; set; }
public Currency Currency { get; set; }
}
public class Currency
{
public int CurrencyId { get; set; }
}
then ...
modelBuilder.Entity<Country>()
.HasRequired(cou => cou.Currency)
.WithOptional()
.WillCascadeOnDelete(false);
... creates a foreign key relationship in the database where CountryId
in the Countries
table is primary key and foreign key to the CurrencyId
of the Currencies
table at the same time, so the Countries
table has only one single column CountryId
. A Currencies
record can live without a related Countries
record. But if a Currencies
record has a related Countries
record then not more than one because the foreign key is CountryId
which is the primary key at the same time and can therefore only be in one record. So the relationship Currencies -> Countries
is 1-to-0...1
.
The other example ...
modelBuilder.Entity<Country>()
.HasRequired(cou => cou.Currency)
.WithMany()
.WillCascadeOnDelete(false);
... creates a second column CurrencyId
in the Countries
table of the database which is non-nullable and is a foreign key to the CurrencyId
of the Currencies
table. So here it is possible that a Currencies
record has no related Countries
record or one or more than one because the foreign key is now another column, not identical with the primary key. Therefore more than one row in the Countries
table may have the same foreign key. The relationship Currencies -> Countries
here is 1-to-0...n
.
Edit
If you take the following code for the two differently configured models ...
Country country1 = new Country();
Country country2 = new Country();
Currency currency = new Currency();
country1.Currency = currency;
country2.Currency = currency;
context.Countries.Add(country1);
context.Countries.Add(country2);
context.SaveChanges();
... then the second case (.WithMany) works: We get two new Countries and one Currency in the database.
However a bit strange is that in the second case (.HasOptional) only the first Country is stored, the second is simply ignored. Actually I had expected to get an exception. I am not sure if that has to be considered as a bug.
Edit2
Changing the order in the example above to ...
context.Countries.Add(country1);
context.Countries.Add(country2);
country1.Currency = currency;
country2.Currency = currency;
... throws the expected exception in the ".HasOptional" case.
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