The relationship could not be changed because one or more of the foreign-key properties is non-nullable

Question

I am getting this error when I GetById() on an entity and then set the collection of child entities to my new list which comes from the MVC view.

The

Answer 1

The reason you're facing this is due to the difference between composition and aggregation.

In composition, the child object is created when the parent is created and is destroyed when its parent is destroyed. So its lifetime is controlled by its parent. e.g. A blog post and its comments. If a post is deleted, its comments should be deleted. It doesn't make sense to have comments for a post that doesn't exist. Same for orders and order items.

In aggregation, the child object can exist irrespective of its parent. If the parent is destroyed, the child object can still exist, as it may be added to a different parent later. e.g.: the relationship between a playlist and the songs in that playlist. If the playlist is deleted, the songs shouldn't be deleted. They may be added to a different playlist.

The way Entity Framework differentiates aggregation and composition relationships is as follows:

• For composition: it expects the child object to a have a composite primary key (ParentID, ChildID). This is by design as the IDs of the children should be within the scope of their parents.

• For aggregation: it expects the foreign key property in the child object to be nullable.

So, the reason you're having this issue is because of how you've set your primary key in your child table. It should be composite, but it's not. So, Entity Framework sees this association as aggregation, which means, when you remove or clear the child objects, it's not going to delete the child records. It'll simply remove the association and sets the corresponding foreign key column to NULL (so those child records can later be associated with a different parent). Since your column does not allow NULL, you get the exception you mentioned.

Solutions:

1- If you have a strong reason for not wanting to use a composite key, you need to delete the child objects explicitly. And this can be done simpler than the solutions suggested earlier:

context.Children.RemoveRange(parent.Children);

2- Otherwise, by setting the proper primary key on your child table, your code will look more meaningful:

parent.Children.Clear();