Entity framework 4 many-to-many insertion?
- by Saxman
Hi all,
I'm not very familiar with the many-to-many insertion process using Entity Framework 4, POCO. I have a blog with 3 tables: Post, Comment, and Tag. A Post can have many Tags and a Tag can be in many Posts. Here are the Post and Tag models:
public class Tag
{
public int Id { get; set; }
[Required]
[StringLength(25, ErrorMessage = "Tag name can't exceed 25 characters.")]
public string Name { get; set; }
public virtual ICollection<Post> Posts { get; set; }
}
public class Post
{
public int Id { get; set; }
[Required]
[StringLength(512, ErrorMessage = "Title can't exceed 512 characters")]
public string Title { get; set; }
[Required]
[AllowHtml]
public string Content { get; set; }
public string FriendlyUrl { get; set; }
public DateTime PostedDate { get; set; }
public bool IsActive { get; set; }
public virtual ICollection<Comment> Comments { get; set; }
public virtual ICollection<Tag> Tags { get; set; }
}
Now when I'm adding a new post, I'm not sure what would be the right way to do. I'm thinking that I'll have a textbox where I can select multiple tags for that post (this part is already done), in my controller, I will check to see if the tag is already exists or not, if not, then I will insert the new tag. But I'm not even sure based on the models that I've created for EF, will they create a PostsTags table, or they are creating just a Tags and a Posts table and links between the two?
How would I insert the new Post and set the tags to that post? Is it just newPost.Tags = Tags (where Tags are the one that got selected, do I even need to check to see if they already exists?), and then something like _post.Add(newPost);?
Thanks.
