Entity Framework (EF) Core is an ORM (Object-Relational Mapper) Framework for data access in .NET Core. It was released along with .NET Core and is an Extensible, Lightweight, Open Source, and Cross-Platform Version of Entity Framework data access technology. It works on multiple operating systems like Windows, Mac, and Linus.

Here, in this article, we are going to discuss how to retrieve the data from the SQL Server Database using the Entity Framework Database First Approach in ASP.NET MVC Application. In our upcoming article, we will discuss using business objects as our model. I’m currently working on an ASP.NET web application that uses Entity Framework for database access.

Create model classes in ASP.NET Core 6

This tutorial on ‘ASP.NET Entity Framework’ covers its features and architecture. Apart from what ASP.NET Entity framework is, it also includes why to use it and its version history. Proceeding further, you will see the what is entity framework comparison between EF6 and EF Core. When an entity has the property of another type of entity property, it is called reference navigation property. It points to a single entity but represents the multiplicity of one.

• The EmployeeDBContext class derives from the DbContext class and is responsible for establishing a connection to the database.
• Once you click on the OK button, you will be back on to the “Choose Your Data Connection” window as shown below.
• Additionally, you might take advantage of unit tests to test the endpoints in your application.
• This is because LINQ allows you to write queries directly in C# instead of SQL or some other query language.

With that being said, EF supports a good like of database providers like SQL Server, MySQL, SQLite, In-memory, and PostgreSQL. For each of these providers, Microsoft has an extension to be installed from the NuGet package manager. The real flexibility this wide range of support provides is that you will not have to depend on the Database Provider ever again. Then based on the application domain classes and DBContext class, the EF Core creates the database and related tables. For a better understanding, please have a look at the following diagram. The term ORM stands for Object-Relational Mapper, and it automatically creates classes based on database tables, and vice versa is also true.

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Let’s understand what entity framework can do for us with an example. Assume we have the following 2 tables (Departments and Employees). Here, in this article, we just see how to use Entity Framework in ASP.NET MVC Application.