best practise/way for master detail / multi table Insert in Entity Framework

Question

My table structure is this

Orders
------ 
Id int identity
OrderDate smalldatetime
OrderStatusid tinyint

Products
--------
Id int identity
Name varchar(50)

         


        

Answer 1

What you are doing now will work just fine.

If you would like to avoid doing a database query when assigning ode.Products, then you could use the following alternative:

// substitute your actual qualified entity set name
ode.ProductsReference.EntityKey = 
    new EntityKey("MyEntities.ProductsEntitySetName", "Id", 2);

This is faster, but less readable. Also, the Products property will be null until you Load it. But for an insert, this is often OK.

Answer 2

Another approach would be to use Stub Objects rather than EntityKeys i.e.

var product = new Product {ID = 2};
ctx.AttachTo("Products", product);
ode.Product = product;

etc. As an added bonus this code will work with POCO objects too in the future.

See this blog post for more information on that technique.