However, if you are developing new projects, particularly projects targeting .NET Core or .NET 5/6+, EF Core is the best choice. EF Core’s flexibility, performance improvements, and cross-platform capabilities make it the perfect selection for modern application development. Entity Framework (EF) is an ORM (Object Relational Mapping) tool. This is used primarily for simplifying the data access layer of an application. Here, in this article, we just see how to use Entity Framework in ASP.NET MVC Application. In our upcoming articles, we will discuss how to perform CRUD operations in ASP.NET MVC using Entity Framework with a real-time example.
To see the local database, select SQL Server Object Explorer from the View menu in Visual Studio as shown in the below image. The Installation of Entity Framework is completed and now, we are ready to use Entity Framework Code First Approach in our Console Application. The process is going to be the same for all other types of applications such as Windows Form, WCF, MVC, Web API, etc.
Controller
As you can see in the above image, Entity Framework API created Students and Standards tables and each table contains columns with appropriate datatypes and lengths. The column names and datatype match with the properties of the respective domain classes. Further, if you notice it has also made StudentId and StandardId as primary keys and created the Standard_StandardId column as the foreign key.
As, we have not passed any parameter to the DBContext class constructor from our context class, so, it will create the database in the local SQLEXPRESS database as shown in the below image. Students and Standards based on the Student and the Standard domain classes which are included as DbSet properties in the context class. Entity Framework is an open-source ORM framework for .NET applications supported by Microsoft. It enables developers to work with data using objects of domain specific classes without focusing on the underlying database tables and columns where this data is stored. The above figure represents how an entity framework interacts with the domain class and database.
Entity Framework In MVC – Part One
The Database Provider sits between the EF Core and the Database it supports. This is the first article of the Entity Framework Core article series, and in this article, I will give you an overview of Entity Framework Core. The Entity Framework Core, or EF Core, is the latest version of Entity Framework and completely rewrites from the ground up. As part of this article, we will discuss the following pointers. MVC (Model View Controller) is a programmatical pattern used for building applications. Microsoft have a a framework called ASP.Net MVC which is their implementation of it for building MVC websites.
- EF Core supports two development approaches 1) Code-First 2) Database-First.
- To take full advantage of this Entity Framework Core Tutorials, you should have the basic knowledge of C# and any database such as SQL Server, Oracle, or MySQL to gain more knowledge of these tutorials.
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These domain classes have nothing to do with Entity Framework. The context class of Entity Framework manages the interaction between the domain classes and your database. This is one of the important classes of Entity Framework and using this class we can interact with the database and perform the database CRUD Operations.
Create migration
As already discussed, we need to use the Entity Framework Code First Approach when we do not have an existing database for our application. The following image shows the working style of Entity Framework Code First Approach. As you can see in the below image, the Entity Framework creates the database based on the domain classes and the context class.
It also contains formatting attributes that help with formatting and don’t provide any validation. The automatic creation of the database context and CRUD (create, read, update, and delete) action methods and views is known as scaffolding. After that we will write the code for retrieving the data from our sql database. In that I created an employee table and using this we will program the retrieve operation. Now, we are done with the initial domain classes for our school application. Later as we progress, we will add more domain classes in this example.
ASP.NET MVC
Select the location where you want to create the project by clicking on the Browse button. This folder contains some auto generated files like Index, Create, Delete etc. In this post, I will show how to build a web application using ASP.NET Core MVC and Entity Framework Core. The application will manage a database of TV Shows and its main page will look like below at the end. I will give a brief introduction about Entity framework and how to implement entity framework in MVC.
EF Core includes providers as NuGet packages which you need to install. Entity Framework Core is the new version of Entity Framework after EF 6.x. It is open-source, lightweight, extensible and a cross-platform version of Entity Framework data access technology. Entity Framework (EF) Core is an ORM (Object-Relational Mapper) Framework for data access in .NET Core. It was released along with .NET Core and is an Extensible, Lightweight, Open Source, and Cross-Platform Version of Entity Framework data access technology. It works on multiple operating systems like Windows, Mac, and Linux.
Learn Tutorials
We will now add Image Url field to our application and show the poster of the TV Show in the records. In the Controllers/TvShowsController.cs , the constructor uses dependency injection to inject the database context (TvShowsContext) into the controller. Services (such what is entity framework as the EF Core DB context) are registered with DI during application startup. Components that require these services are provided with these services via constructor parameters. Next, we will create our controller and views (View-Controller part of the MVC app).
In the next article, I am going to discuss how to create Hyperlink in ASP.NET MVC application. Once you click on the Finish button, let’s see what the things are created by Entity Framework. It will add the reference to the Entity Framework in the reference folder.
EF Core with MVC
However, not all EF6 features are currently implemented in EF Core. Please check the following link for more detailed information. The EF 6.x is a stable and fully tested ORM technology in many .NET Framework applications. The application targets .NET Core, e.g., ASP.NET Core Applications. Entity Framework Core is the new and improved version of the Entity Framework for .NET Core applications. EF Core continues to support the same features and concepts as EF 6.
