Set up database creation/migrations from code for Entity Framework 6 + MySQL

Question

I've previously used NHibernate and Fluent Migrator in projects to create a database (if it didn't already exist) and update the schema through migration scripts. I'm looking over Entity Framework (6) to do a comparison and I'm having trouble replicating that functionality.

In my App.config , I've set up my connection string and db providers. I then went ahead and created a data model that I would like to be represented as a table in the database.

namespace DataModels
{
    public class StoreClient
    {
        public int Id;
        public string DisplayName;

        public StoreClient()
        {
        }
    }
}

I then went ahead and created a database context.

namespace DataModels
{
    public class StoreContext : DbContext
    {
        public DbSet<StoreClient> StoreClients { get; set; }
    }
}

On service start I created an instance of StoreContext and tried to add and call db.SaveChanges(); , but this is failing because there is no schema that matches my StoreClient.

My question is simple. How do I configure my StoreContext (or EF in general) to automatically create my database schema, and how do I set it up to migrate when I make changes to that schema?

This seems simple, but my searching around hasn't gotten me anything that looks remotely familiar coming from the NHibernate world.

Answer 1

If you want your db to be created automatically try to put some code in your Application_Start() method. for example:

Database.SetInitializer(new MigrateDatabaseToLatestVersion<StoreContext, Configuration>());
StoreContext context = new StoreContext();
context.Database.Initialize(true);

Where Configuration class is created upon automatic migrations are enables in the console. Check out this msdn demo . Also i am not shure that your code firs model will work that way. If not try changing your fields with properties.

namespace DataModels
{
    public class StoreClient
    {
        public int Id { get; set; }
        public string DisplayName { get; set; }
        public StoreClient()
        {
        }
    }
}