Mapping single class with a table was bit easy and fun. Next should be mapping associations, first I will try to map a simple one, using our existing application code. A person can have multiple email addresses.

So here is the modified code for person

    public class PersonItem
    {
        public int Id { get; set; }
        public string FirstName { get; set; }
        public string LastName { get; set; }
        public string Gender { get; set; }
        public Nullable<DateTime> BirthDate { get; set; }

        public virtual ICollection<EmailItem> Emails { get; set; }

        public PersonItem() { this.Emails = new List<EmailItem>(); }
    }

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In my previous post I generated a database without any mapping or customization, I got what Entity Framework could coerce from my class. Look at the schema which was generated.

Let’s see what I did not like about this.

• table name is not what I like to have
• Id was not marked as identity column, so no auto generation for this column
• all alphanumeric columns are created using nvarchar(MAX) which is not good too
• and the last, I wanted to use only date for birthdate not datetime

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I was working on a personal project today, and did a lot of experiments on Code First Model with Entity Framework. All of these were quite amazing and revealed a lot of underlying implementation and how things have progressed in Entity Framework world. I looked at various articles which helped me understand all these aspects, and am grateful of all of them. So I thought why not write some posts of mine too, just to document what I have learned, so that others might benefit from it too.

For that purpose I am starting with a simplest item, I will try to generate a database for a single class, and see how it looks. By the way I am using Entity Framework 5.

Here is the class, which I will work on.

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