I've been wrestling with this for a while and can't quite figure out what's happening. I have a Card entity which contains Sides (usually 2) - and both Cards and Sides have a Stage. I'm using EF Codefirst migrations and the migrations are failing with this error:
Introducing FOREIGN KEY constraint 'FK_dbo.Sides_dbo.Cards_CardId' on table 'Sides' may cause cycles or multiple cascade paths. Specify ON DELETE NO ACTION or ON UPDATE NO ACTION, or modify other FOREIGN KEY constraints.
Here's my Card entity:
public class Card
{
public Card()
{
Sides = new Collection<Side>();
Stage = Stage.ONE;
}
[Key]
[Required]
public virtual int CardId { get; set; }
[Required]
public virtual Stage Stage { get; set; }
[Required]
[ForeignKey("CardId")]
public virtual ICollection<Side> Sides { get; set; }
}
Here's my Side entity:
public class Side
{
public Side()
{
Stage = Stage.ONE;
}
[Key]
[Required]
public virtual int SideId { get; set; }
[Required]
public virtual Stage Stage { get; set; }
[Required]
public int CardId { get; set; }
[ForeignKey("CardId")]
public virtual Card Card { get; set; }
}
And here's my Stage entity:
public class Stage
{
// Zero
public static readonly Stage ONE = new Stage(new TimeSpan(0, 0, 0), "ONE");
// Ten seconds
public static readonly Stage TWO = new Stage(new TimeSpan(0, 0, 10), "TWO");
public static IEnumerable<Stage> Values
{
get
{
yield return ONE;
yield return TWO;
}
}
public int StageId { get; set; }
private readonly TimeSpan span;
public string Title { get; set; }
Stage(TimeSpan span, string title)
{
this.span = span;
this.Title = title;
}
public TimeSpan Span { get { return span; } }
}
What's odd is that if I add the following to my Stage class:
public int? SideId { get; set; }
[ForeignKey("SideId")]
public virtual Side Side { get; set; }
The migration runs successfully. If I open up SSMS and look at the tables, I can see that Stage_StageId
has been added to Cards
(as expected/desired), however Sides
contains no reference to Stage
(not expected).
If I then add
[Required]
[ForeignKey("StageId")]
public virtual Stage Stage { get; set; }
public int StageId { get; set; }
To my Side class, I see StageId
column added to my Side
table.
This is working, but now throughout my application, any reference to Stage
contains a SideId
, which is in some cases totally irrelevant. I'd like to just give my Card
and Side
entities a Stage
property based on the above Stage class without polluting the stage class with reference properties if possible... what am I doing wrong?
Because Stage
is required, all one-to-many relationships where Stage
is involved will have cascading delete enabled by default. It means, if you delete a Stage
entity
Side
Card
and because Card
and Side
have a required one-to-many relationship with cascading delete enabled by default again it will then cascade from Card
to Side
So, you have two cascading delete paths from Stage
to Side
- which causes the exception.
You must either make the Stage
optional in at least one of the entities (i.e. remove the [Required]
attribute from the Stage
properties) or disable cascading delete with Fluent API (not possible with data annotations):
modelBuilder.Entity<Card>()
.HasRequired(c => c.Stage)
.WithMany()
.WillCascadeOnDelete(false);
modelBuilder.Entity<Side>()
.HasRequired(s => s.Stage)
.WithMany()
.WillCascadeOnDelete(false);