Referenced objects are not being populated in EF6 collection

Question

So I have a model that has a Salesman and a Region . The salesman belongs to a region.

Salesman.cs

public class Salesman : Employee
{
    public Salesman()
    {
        this.Invoices = new List<Invoice>();
    }

    public int? RegionId { get; set; }

    [ForeignKey("RegionId")]
    public virtual Region Region { get; set; }

    public virtual ICollection<Invoice> Invoices { get; set; }
}

Salesman inherits Employee with stores basic name, address, etc data - which is not relevant.

Region.cs

public class Region
{
    public Region()
    {
        this.Salesmen = new List<Salesman>();
    }

    [Key]
    public int Id { get; set; }

    [Required]
    public string Name { get; set; }

    public int? SalesManagerId { get; set; }

    [ForeignKey("SalesManagerId")]
    public virtual Salesman SalesManager { get; set; }

    public virtual ICollection<Salesman> Salesmen { get; set; }

}

The issue I am having is that Region.Salesmen is not being filled by EF like it has in other projects.

The Region populates fine in the Salesman.Region property.

Stuff tried and in the project

• Lazy-loading is on (I have explicitly enabled it)
• Renaming property names ie. Salesmen -> Salesmans
• The database has the correct schema
• Changing ICollection to ISet

I am possibly thinking that it might have to do with a naming convention like Salesman -> Salesmen as opposed to Salesman -> Salesmans

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

So I solved it by adding an attribute to the ICollection<Salesman> Salesmen property.

Now my model looks like this...

public class Region
{
    public Region()
    {
        this.Salesmen = new List<Salesman>();
    }

    [Key]
    public int Id { get; set; }

    [Required]
    public string Name { get; set; }

    public int? SalesManagerId { get; set; }

    [ForeignKey("SalesManagerId")]
    public virtual Salesman SalesManager { get; set; }

    [InverseProperty("Region")]
    public virtual ICollection<Salesman> Salesmen { get; set; }

}

Don't ask me why it works, and why EF couldn't link it up without a little help.. but it does.