What is the recommended practice to update or delete multiple entities in EntityFramework?

Question

In SQL one might sometimes write something like

DELETE FROM table WHERE column IS NULL

or

UPDATE table SET column1=valu         


        

Answer 1

Take a look to Entity Framework Extensions (Multiple entity updates). This project allow set operations using lambda expressions. Samples from doc:

this.Container.Devices.Delete(o => o.Id == 1);

this.Container.Devices.Update(
     o => new Device() { 
        LastOrderRequest = DateTime.Now, 
        Description = o.Description + "teste"
     }, 
     o => o.Id == 1);

Digging EFE project source code you can see how automatize @Ladislav Mrnka second approach also adding setting operations:

    public override string GetDmlCommand()
    {
        //Recover Table Name

        StringBuilder updateCommand = new StringBuilder();
        updateCommand.Append("UPDATE ");
        updateCommand.Append(MetadataAccessor.GetTableNameByEdmType(
                                  typeof(T).Name));
        updateCommand.Append(" ");
        updateCommand.Append(setParser.ParseExpression());
        updateCommand.Append(whereParser.ParseExpression());

        return updateCommand.ToString();
    }

Edited 3 years latter

Take a look to this great answer: https://stackoverflow.com/a/12751429