Entity Framework: A referential integrity constraint violation on many to many relationship

Question

Hey I have an application with a bunch of inproc caching and entity framework. When I want to write an update to an entity I reattach the cached copy. I track all things I\'

Answer 1

To add to @Slauma's answer, it isn't just when adding objects to your context. For your example, if you edit the CurrentLocationId in Person, you also need to edit the CurrentLocation object embedded in the Person object. EF will automatically populate the CurrentLocation object because CurrentLocationId has a foreign key in the CurrentLocation's table. When you edit the CurrentLocationId without updating the CurrentLocation object as well, they become out of sync. This is what causes the exception in this case.

So let's say you needed to update the Person object's CurrentLocationId. We'll assume you pre-fetched the Person data and the Location data.

public class DbData 
{
    List PersonList;
    List LocationList;
    public DbData()
    {
        using (var context = new MyContext())
        {
             PersonList = context.Persons.ToList();
             LocationList = context.Locations.ToList();
        }
    }

    public void UpdatePersonLocation(Person person, int newLocationId)
    {
        using (var context = new MyContext())
        {
            var location = LocationList.Where(l=>l.id==newLocationId).Single();
            //you need to update both the id and the location for this to not throw the exception
            person.CurrentLocationId == newLocationId;
            person.CurrentLocation == location;  
            context.Entry(person).State = System.Data.Entity.EntityState.Modified;
            context.SaveChanges();
        }
    }
    //or if you're giving it the location object...
    public void UpdatePersonLocation(Person person, Location location)
    {
        using (var context = new MyContext())
        {
            //you need to update both the id and the location for this to not throw the exception
            person.CurrentLocationId == location.id;
            person.CurrentLocation == location;  
            context.Entry(person).State = System.Data.Entity.EntityState.Modified;
            context.SaveChanges();
        }
    }
}