How to disable automapping of properties in Entity Framework

Question

I've decided to use fluent mapping in Entity Framework. My intention was to map everyting by code without any atributes and auto mapping functions. Best way I've found is class EntityTypeConfiguration, that I implement for each entity in my project.

Later I add property to one of my entity. This property isn't needed to be persisted. I've expected, that until I add mapping for this property, it will be ignored by database and persistence layer. Unfortunatly it doesn't work that way, and property is mapped. Only way is to use Ignore method or NotMapped attribute, but I don't want to do it explicitly.

Is there any way, to stop Entity Framework from automapping? I've tried to remove all Conventions from DbModelBuilder, but it doesn't help.

Answer 1

So far as I am aware, there is no other way around it. You need to use either Ignore() or [NotMapped] . I tend to prefer the former as it does not clutter up the model.

Answer 2

Actually I have tried a lot of ways: - custom convention to remove mapped properties - removing all conventions

But the easiest (and cleanest) way was to use reflection inside the mapping class and to disable all property mappings that weren't configured.

The code for that (and also an usage example) is inside my public gist. https://gist.github.com/hidegh/36d92380c720804dee043fde8a863ecb