EF Forced Concurrency Checks

Question

I have an issue with EF 4.0 that I hope someone can help with. I currently have an entity that I want to update in a last in wins fashion (ie ignore concurrency checks and just overwrite whats in the db with what is submitted). It seems Entity Framework not only includes the primary key of the entity in the where clause of the generated sql, but also any foreign key fields. This is annoying as it means that I don't get true last in wins semantics and need to know what value the fk field had before the update or I get a concurrency exception.

I am aware that this can be short circuited by including a foreign key field as well as the navigation property on the entity. I would like to avoid this if possible as it's not a very clean solution.

I was just wondering if there was any other way to override this behaviour? It seems like more of a bug than a feature. I have no problem with ef doing concurrency checks if I instruct it to do so but not being able to bypass concurrency completely is a bit of a hindrance as there are many valid scenarios where this is not needed

Answer 1

I am not 100% sure this will work, but I was curious myself and think I might have found a solution.

What if you set the [ConcurrencyCheck] attribute on a field that is immutable (in my case I used the ID (Primary Key). Since that will never be changed it will never trigger a concurrency exception and therefore clobber your entry.

Give it a whirl and see if that solves your issue.