Cascade on delete not cascading with EF

Question

I have a simple sqlite database with two tables. When I manually delete (using SQLite Expert)an entry in table DataSets, the coresponding entry in OneD is deleted as expecte

Answer 1

From the SQLite documentation: http://www.sqlite.org/foreignkeys.html

Foreign key constraints are disabled by default (for backwards compatibility), so must be enabled separately for each database connection separately.

Could this be your problem? I don't know if your Entity Framework turns it on by default with:

  sqlite> PRAGMA foreign_keys = ON;

Edit: Looking a bit further i stumbled across this: http://nitoprograms.blogspot.com/2010_06_01_archive.html

The Entity Framework is actually an ADO.NET data provider that is itself wrapping an ADO.NET data provider (SQLite, to be specific). Normally, the Entity Framework will open a database connection whenever it needs one; these automatically-opened connections are automatically closed when the Entity Framework is finished with it. This default behavior works well with SQL Server due to its ADO.NET provider's connection pooling. However, it does not work well with SQLite, due to various "properties" existing on the SQLite connection itself. One example is "PRAGMA foreign_keys = ON", which enforces foreign keys only for that SQLite database connection. If the Entity Framework opens and closes its connections at will, then SQLite PRAGMAs such as these are lost.

Answer 2

The problem can be solved by enabling foreign keys in the connection string:

data source=mydb.db;foreign keys=true

Answer 3

here's my solution to that problem:

db.Connection.StateChange += ConnectionStateChange;

void ConnectionStateChange(object sender, System.Data.StateChangeEventArgs e)
{
    if (e.CurrentState == System.Data.ConnectionState.Open) 
         db.ExecuteStoreCommand("PRAGMA foreign_keys = true;");            
}