Let’s modify the default route in the RouteConfig class so that when the application runs for the first time it will redirect to the Index Action method of Employee Controller. It will create the DBContext class for us whose name is the same as the name of the connection what is entity framework string that is EmployeeDBContext. The EmployeeDBContext class derives from the DbContext class and is responsible for establishing a connection to the database. The  EmployeeDataModel.Context.cs which is inside EmployeedataModel.Context.tt as sown below.

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.

Entity Framework Code First Approach

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.

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.

// Student.cs

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 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).

• The EF Core database provider usually contains the functionality specific to the database it supports.
• Now run the application and you should get the result as expected as shown in the below image.
• As you see, the TvShows table and the migration history table are created automatically.
• It was released along with .NET Core and is an Extensible, Lightweight, Open Source, and Cross-Platform Version of Entity Framework data access technology.

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.

Controller

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.

The following diagram shows the workflow of the Entity Framework Code-First Approach. If these steps are not clear at the moment, then don’t worry we will understand all these steps in detail in our upcoming articles. Prior to .NET 3.5, we (developers) often used to write ADO.NET code or Enterprise Data Access Block to save or retrieve application data from the underlying database. We used to open a connection to the database, create a DataSet to fetch or submit the data to the database, convert data from the DataSet to .NET objects or vice-versa to apply business rules. Microsoft has provided a framework called “Entity Framework” to automate all these database related activities for your application. First, you need to create your domain classes as per your business requirement.

EF Core Development Approaches

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.

Provide the necessary details to communicate with the database such as Server name, select the Authentication Type, select the Database and click on the Ok button as shown below. There are also many interview questions which will help students to get placed in the companies. I hope you enjoyed reading this post and found it helpful and easy to understand. Please let me know if you have any comments and/or corrections. For server-side validation, the second Create method (POST version) calls ModelState.IsValid to check whether the movie has any validation errors.

EF Core mainly targets the code-first approach and provides little support for the database-first approach because the visual designer or wizard for DB model is not supported as of EF Core. The Entity Framework Core is an updated and enhanced version of the Entity Framework designed for .NET Core applications. While the EF Core is relatively new and not as fully developed as the EF 6, it still supports its predecessor’s features and concepts.

Now open the program class file and first add the necessary namespace. Here, please make sure to select Package Manager from the output dropdown list. Entity Framework Core is the new and improved version of Entity Framework for .NET Core applications. The EF Core database provider usually contains the functionality specific to the database it supports. The framework will create the EDMX file within the Models folder.

For example, Student and Standard domain classes in this case. The DbSet is a collection of entity classes (i.e. entity set). Here, we have given the property name in the plural form of the entity name like Students and Standards as it is recommended by Microsoft.