I have a design problem with regards to Entity Framework model relationship
I have this model in the edmx
Business Rule:
A Participant can have multiple Roles so I create a relationship table ParticipantRoles that has 1-to-Many relationship on the Participant and the Role table
The Problem:
In order to get the Participant's Role value, I have to drill down through Participant->ParticipantRole->Role (see JSON output below)
The Question:
In EF, how to design the table relationship to bypass the ParticipantsRole table. I want to access the Role in something like this Particant.Role and not Participant.ParticipantsRole.Role
You say A Participant can have multiple Roles. And of course, a Role can have multiple Participants. So basically this is a many-to-many association.
Entity Framework will only map pure many-to-many associations (without connecting class) when the junction table only has two foreign keys. In your case, if the table ParticipantsRole only would have had a primary key consisting of ParticipantId and RoleId at the time of generating the model the class ParticipantsRole would not have been created. You would have had Participant.Roles and Role.Participants as navigation properties.
However, the model has been generated with ParticipantsRole and you want to get rid of it. (Or not, I'll get back to that).
This is what you can do:
Remove ParticipantRoles from the class diagram.
Modify the database table ParticipantRoles so it only has the two FK columns, that both form the primary key.
Update the model from the database and select ParticipantsRole in the Add tab.
This should give you a model with a pure many-to-many association.
However, think twice before you do this. M2m associations have a way of evolving into 1-m-1association (as you've got now). The reason is that sooner or later the need is felt to record data about the association, so the junction table must have more fields and stops being a pure junction table. In your case I can imagine that one day participant's roles must have a fixed order, or one marked as default. It can be a major overhaul to change a m2m association into 1-m-1 in a production environment. - Something to consider...
Related
Title is the question. When should a relationship in an ER diagram be given its own table in a RDBMS? For instance, one mail courier(with attributes eid and surname) can deliver a number of packages but a package(attributes,pid, sent_By, going_to) can only have one mail courier. Would it make sense to make a table for the relationship called delivers(with an attribute of the time that the package was delivered)? or should the eid of the mail_courier and time_delivered from the deliver relationship be added to the package entity? Also, what would be an example when you would not want to add the attributes to the package entity?
I think what you are trying is to create a one-to-many relationship between two entities. And for that, there is no need to create a separate table; as you mentioned in your question, just add those two attributes to the package table.
Where you would need to create a separate table is when you want to achieve many-to-many relationship between two entities. For example, take twitter's followers. One user can have many followers and a follower can follow many users. You can't do that the relational way without creating a new table with just those two columns.
How do we translate something like this into SQL?
Entity A -thick line- relation -simple line- Entity B
Its easy enough to write any of the other connections, but somehow I can't seem to figure it out when it comes to 1 thick line and a simple one, like shown aboove
I have a primary key which is the date of a football season (Entity A - Season) and an entity (Entity B - Football team) which has 2 primary keys which are it's name and primary key of the Season entity. But 'cause of that doubt I have I can't relate them properly.
Relations do not typically form independent tables (diamonds). However, for a many-many relationship, you will usually see them in a separate tables. Depending on your notation (there are many) your diagram could represent a many-many relationship or a 1:1 relationship.
Strong entities (your rectangles) get tables.
In your ER diagram, you will also typically see attributes for each table in circles connected by lines to the entity itself. Those attributes are turned into columns for each table. Attributes which are underlined in the diagram are representative of a primary key for a particular entity.
Additional or strange constraints that aren't typically easily represented in an ER diagram are usually put as side notes.
To answer your question, you must know whether or not it's a many-many relationship; if so, you would create a SeasonClub table with the two different primary keys inside it.
I have two models :
Card with has_many relation to Works
I mean i have 7 static works in my database and i can choose some of them when i create a Card.
I defined a has_many relationship like this :
My problem is strange... it seems to work, but when i explore my sqlite file, i don't see any table relationship between Card and Work.
I am expecting a table with card_id and work_id.
How core data store has many relationship?
Firstly, I'd caution you from opening up the sqlite files Core Data spits out and trying to infer things from them. It's meant to be an opaque format: you're only supposed to interact with Core Data persistent stores through the Core Data APIs.
However, to answer your question: in general in database design, you wouldn't use a linking table like you describe for a one-to-many relationship, only for a many-to-many. For a one-to-many, you'd have a foreign key field in the table at the 'one' end, and have the contents of that field be the primary key of another table. For example (sorry for the random example I found on Google):
tblOrder is in a one-to-many relationship with tblOrderDetails. This is implemented by having an Order# field in the to-many side of the relationship, which is a foreign key referring to the primary key of the tblOrder table. As you can see, no linking table is needed.
A many-to-many relationship would need a linking table, but a one-to-many does not.
One final point: I note in your screenshot that you don't have an inverse relationship set up for your works or customer relationships. Core Data requires all relationships to have an inverse, otherwise your data may become corrupted. (That's somewhat a simplification, since there are other ways to work around it, but in general making inverses is easiest.)
I have a trip (primary: idTrip), where I can link more packages (primary: idPackage), so, I got a relationship table to link trips with packages (primary: idRelTripPackage). (relationship n-to-n)
And next I got a registrations table (primary: idRegistration). How do I best link those (1-to-1 relationship)?
I add two columns in the registrations table (idTrip, idPackage)?
I add a relationship table where i link idRegistration, idTrip, idPackage?
I add a relationship table where i link idRegistration, idRelTripPackage?
Am I right in thinking the relation from Registrations is to RelTripPackage, and its definitely one-to-one. There are a couple of options:
1: As it really is a one-to-one there's not really anything to stop you putting the Registrations data directly onto RelTripPackage, or doing the vice-versa and putting idPackage and idTrip straight onto Registrations as FKs, with a unique key across the two FK columns to ensure there aren't duplicates.
2: If do want the two separate tables then just add idRetTripPackage to Registrations as an FK, and then add a unique constraint on it - again to ensure uniqueness.
There's no need for a separate relationship table as its a 1-1 relationship - They only really become relevant when you are using an n-n. The rest of the time FKs should be placed directly on the child table.
If you follow that logic, you will
add tables and Relations every time you need to add Relations
end up with confusing or duplicate Relations (multiple paths between any two tables)
However the problem (limiting factor) is that the tables you are starting with are not actually normalised. Since the starting position does not have a good basis, you will end up with far more Relations (in tables) than there actually are between the Entities. So the best advice is, the Best practice is, before you attempt this current extension, step back and normalise the data, the existing tables. Then the extension will be much easier, and you will end up with less tables.
if you provide info re the tables (Person, Trip, Package, etc); what exactly is a Registration, etc ... I can provide more explicit answers.
Generally any attribute that is 1::1 with the PK of an Entity should be an attribute in that entity. Any attribute that is 1::0-1 with the PK of an Entity should be in a separate table.
ER Diagram
Based on the information provided, this is your ▶Entity Relation Diagram◀. As long as you use Relational Identifiers, all the Relations you have identified thus far are supported directly (otherwise, if you use IDs, you will need more Relations and tables).
Readers who are unfamiliar with the Relational Database Modelling standard may find ▶IDEF1X Notation◀ useful.
I am just starting out with ADO.net Entity Framework I have mapped two tables together and receive the following error:
Error 1 Error 11010: Association End 'OperatorAccess' is not mapped. E:\Visual Studio\projects\Brandi II\Brandi II\Hospitals.edmx 390 11 Brandi II
Not sure what it is I am doing wrong.
I believe I can add some more clarity to the issue (learning as I go):
When I look at the Mapping details and look at the association, the column for operatoraccess table (from above) is blank and the drop down only includes field from the linked table.
The Entity Framework designer is terrible - I've had the same problem many times (and your problem too, Craig):
This happens when you have a many-to-one association which is improperly setup. They could very easily fix the designer to make this process simple; but instead, we have to put up with this crap.
To fix:
Click on the association, and go to the mapping details view.
Under association, click on Maps to <tablename>. Choose the table(s) which make up the many side of the relationship (ie. the table(s) which make up the *-side of the association in the designer)
Under Column, choose the table-columns which map to each entity-side Property. You get this error when one of those entries are blank.
I had the exact same problem and this is what I did to fix it.
Make sure you have an Entity Key set in your designer on the tables your making an association with. Also check that StoreGeneratedPattern is set to Identity for that Entity Key.
There's not a lot of information in your question, but, generally speaking, this means that there is an incompletely defined association. It could be that you have tried to map one table with a foreign key to another table, but have not mapped that other table. You can also get this error when you try to do table per type inheritance without carefully following the steps for implementing that feature.
Not sure of the answer, but I've just posted a similar question, which may at least help clarify the issue you are experiencing.
Defining an Entity Framework 1:1 association
I had to go back into the database itself and clarify the foreign key relationship
I had this problem in the case where I was creating both many to 0..1 and 0..1 to 0..1 associations. One entity needed associations to multiple tables, and that entity did not have foreign keys defined for those tables.
I had to do the table mappings step that is given in the accepted answer, but note that it wasn't only for many to many associations; it applied to all the types of associations I added for this entity.
In the Mapping Details view, I had to select the entity with the non-foreign key ID columns to the various tables. This is not always the "many" side of the relationship. Only there was I able to map the related entity property to the appropriate property in the original entity. Selecting the "destination" entity would not allow me to select the properties that I needed to, and the error would still exist.
So in short, I had to map using the table related to the entity that had the "non-foreign key" ID fields corresponding to the various entities' (and their tables') primary keys that I needed to associate.
Entity A
various other properties...
Id
ContactId
OrderId
etc.
Contact entity
Id
FirstName
LastName
etc.
In the mapping details, I selected Entity A's table. It then showed both ends of the association. I mapped its Entity A's Id property to its table's actual ID column (they had different names). I then mapped the Contact entity's Id field to the ContactId field on the A entity.
Simply select the many relationship table (*) from the Association>Edit Mapping & select the appropriate relationship