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

You must manually clear the ChildItems collection and append new items into it:

thisParent.ChildItems.Clear();
thisParent.ChildItems.AddRange(modifiedParent.ChildItems);

After that you can call DeleteOrphans extension method which will handle with orphaned entities (it must be called between DetectChanges and SaveChanges methods).

public static class DbContextExtensions
{
    private static readonly ConcurrentDictionary< EntityType, ReadOnlyDictionary< string, NavigationProperty>> s_navPropMappings = new ConcurrentDictionary< EntityType, ReadOnlyDictionary< string, NavigationProperty>>();

    public static void DeleteOrphans( this DbContext source )
    {
        var context = ((IObjectContextAdapter)source).ObjectContext;
        foreach (var entry in context.ObjectStateManager.GetObjectStateEntries(EntityState.Modified))
        {
            var entityType = entry.EntitySet.ElementType as EntityType;
            if (entityType == null)
                continue;

            var navPropMap = s_navPropMappings.GetOrAdd(entityType, CreateNavigationPropertyMap);
            var props = entry.GetModifiedProperties().ToArray();
            foreach (var prop in props)
            {
                NavigationProperty navProp;
                if (!navPropMap.TryGetValue(prop, out navProp))
                    continue;

                var related = entry.RelationshipManager.GetRelatedEnd(navProp.RelationshipType.FullName, navProp.ToEndMember.Name);
                var enumerator = related.GetEnumerator();
                if (enumerator.MoveNext() && enumerator.Current != null)
                    continue;

                entry.Delete();
                break;
            }
        }
    }

    private static ReadOnlyDictionary CreateNavigationPropertyMap( EntityType type )
    {
        var result = type.NavigationProperties
            .Where(v => v.FromEndMember.RelationshipMultiplicity == RelationshipMultiplicity.Many)
            .Where(v => v.ToEndMember.RelationshipMultiplicity == RelationshipMultiplicity.One || (v.ToEndMember.RelationshipMultiplicity == RelationshipMultiplicity.ZeroOrOne && v.FromEndMember.GetEntityType() == v.ToEndMember.GetEntityType()))
            .Select(v => new { NavigationProperty = v, DependentProperties = v.GetDependentProperties().Take(2).ToArray() })
            .Where(v => v.DependentProperties.Length == 1)
            .ToDictionary(v => v.DependentProperties[0].Name, v => v.NavigationProperty);

        return new ReadOnlyDictionary(result);
    }
}