How to work with table relationships and entity inheritances in ADO.NET Entity Data Model

This article describes an All-In-One Code Framework sample that is available for download. This code sample includes a step-by-step guide about how to work with Entity Data Model in various ways, including One-to-Many association, Many-to-Many association, One-to-One association, table merging, table splitting, Table-per-Hierarchy inheritance, and Table-per-Type inheritance.

Difficulty level

Download information

To download this code sample, click the following link:

  

Technical overview

The Entity Framework is a set of technologies in ADO.NET that support development of data –oriented software applications. It enables developers to work with data in the form of domain-specific objects and properties, such as customers and customer addresses, without having to concern themselves with the underlying database tables and columns where this data is stored.

The Entity Data Model (EDM) is a specification for defining the data used by applications built on the Entity Framework. Applications using the EDM define entities and relationships in the domain of the application in the design schema. The design schema is used to build programmable classes used by application code. Storage structures that persist data for applications in this model are represented in another schema called the storage schema. A mapping specification connects the design schema and the storage schema.

This code sample shows how to work with the EDM in various ways, including how to create One-to-Many association, Many-to-Many association and One-to-One association between EDM entities, how to merge two database tables into one EDM entity and split one database table into two EDM entities with one-to-one association, how to implement Table-per-Hierarchy inheritance and Table-per-Type inheritance in EDM.

Note For more information about how to create the sample application and how to deploy the sample application, see the Readme.txt file that is included in the download package.

Technology category

• ADO.NET

Languages

This code sample contains the following programming languages:

Prerequisites

• You must attach the database file (.mdf) that is included in the download package to your SQL Server instance, and then modify the connection string information in the app.config file.
• This sample application was created by using Visual Studio 2008 with Service Pack 1 installed.

Tags

• Entity Framework, Entity Data Model

What is All-In-One Code Framework?

All-In-One Code Framework shows most Microsoft development techniques by using code samples in different programming languages. Each example is carefully selected, composed, and documented to show one common code scenario. For more information about All-In-One Code Framework, visit the following Web site:
http://cfx.codeplex.com (http://cfx.codeplex.com)

How to find more All-In-One Code Framework samples

To find more All-In-One Code Framework samples, you can search for kbcodefx together with related keywords on support.microsoft.com. Or, you can simply click the following link:
http://support.microsoft.com/search/default.aspx?query=kbcodefx (http://support.microsoft.com/search/default.aspx?query=kbcodefx)

For more information, visit the following Web sites:

• ADO.NET Entity Framework (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb399572.aspx)
• Entity Data Model (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb387122.aspx)