An Enthusiastic Programmer

Data Annotations Attributes Overview

01 Apr 2020 | CSharp-EF
EF annotations

Entity Framework Core and Entity Framework both provide attributes for help programmers conveniently specify database-related information.

Entities have their conventions between entities and database tables. However, you can change it with extra data annotations attributes.

you can independently point out the name of the database, the name of the field, the name of the constraint, etc… instead of using the default conventions.

These annotations are included in the System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations namespace and the System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations.Schema namespace. both are not framework depending namespaces. In other words, it is valid in EF 6 as well as valid in EF Core.

Note: Annotations only give you a subset of configuration options. and Fluent API provides full configuration options.

I am going to list out partial common attributes for reference purposes.

System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations namespace

Attribute Description
Key Denotes one or more properties that uniquely identify an entity
Required Specifies that a data field value is required
MaxLength Specifies the maximum length of array or string data allowed in a property
MinLength Specifies the minimum length of array or string data allowed in a property
StringLength Specifies the minimum and maximum length of characters that allowed in a data field

System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations.Schema namespace

Attribute Description
Table Can be applied to an entity class to configure the corresponding table name and schema in the database
Column Specifies the database column that a property is mapped to
ForeignKey Denotes a property used as a foreign key in a relationship
NotMapped Denotes a property or a class should be excluded from the database mapping
InverseProperty Can be applied to a property to specify the inverse of a navigation property that represents the other end of the same relationship.

Below is an example for illustrating.

public class Classroom { 
    public int id { set; get; }

    [Required(ErrorMessage = "class name is required")]
    [MaxLength(20)]
    public string classname { set; get; }
}
[Table("student_table")]
public class Student { 
    [Key]
    [Required]
    public int id { set; get; }

    [Required(ErrorMessage ="student name is required")]
    [StringLength(maximumLength:20)]
    [Column("student_name")]
    public string studentname { set; get; }

    public Classroom classroom { set; get; }
}

The result:

Alt

The database’s fields have shown the conversion clearly. If we don’t use annotations, then Entity Framework Core will use the default convention to achieve conversions.

The Table attribute in this example hasn’t specified the schema yet. to complete this only needs to assign a value to the schema property in Table attribute.

[Table("student_table",Schema="dbo")]
public class Student { 
//...
}

I assigned the dbo to the schema. However, the default schema would also be dbo, if you don’t specify it.

As you can see from the illustration, these basic attributes are easy to use.

In the next episodes, I am going to dig into other attributes.

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