Unable to expose Foreign Key property for associations

[TondaKrist]

Foreign Key properties are not generated in code.

[msawczyn]

No, they're not; that's as-designed.

The tool is centered around object modeling, not data modeling. Foreign keys are database concepts rather than object concepts. To access associated objects you access the objects ... the foreign keys are used for persistence only, and violate the concept of "plain old C# objects" since they wouldn't be there if you weren't in a persistence context.

EF will use those to support whatever it needs to do its job, and the code generated for the DbContext does indeed specify the keys (since that's where they're important). But not in the entities.

[TondaKrist]

I understand that they are not auto generated, but it is a pitty that I can not even add them manually in partial class using EF naming convention. For some performance issues we use really often FK to attaching objects. EF designer is really nice tool, and I am personally so sad we can not use it for both object and data modeling.

[msawczyn]

I've tagged this as an enhancement request. It's possible that we can set a flag at the designer (and class level, for override) to generate those, but I'll need to look into the implications.

[Cyclonit]

I'd like to add my +1 to this issue. this enhancement would allow using EFDesigner for very resource hungry use cases.