Entity Framework delete child object

Question

I have two tables without any cascade deleting. I want to delete parent object with all child objects. I do it this way

//get parent object
return _dataConte         


        

Answer 1

It is enough to set the

<OnDelete Action="Cascade" />

for the master association end in the CSDL part of the model.
In this case your code will work.

Answer 2

My situation was slightly different, and it took a while to get it right so I thought it worth documenting. I have two related tables, Quote and QuoteExtension:

• Quote (Parent, Primary Key QuoteId)
• QuoteExtension (Calculated fields for Quote, Primary and Foreign Key QuoteId)

I didn't have to set the OnDelete action to get it to work - but Craig's comment (if I could vote that up more I would!) led me to discover the issue. I was attempting to delete the Quote when QuoteExtension was not loaded. Therefore I found two ways that worked:

var quote = ent.Quote.Include("QuoteExtension").First(q => q.QuoteId == 2311);
ent.DeleteObject(quote);
ent.SaveChanges();

Or:

var quote = ent.Quote.First(q => q.QuoteId == 2311);
if (quote.QuoteExtension != null)
    ent.Refresh(RefreshMode.ClientWins, quote.QuoteExtension);
ent.DeleteObject(quote);
ent.SaveChanges();

Interestingly trying to delete QuoteExtension manually didn't work (although it may have if I had included ent.SaveChanges() in the middle - this tends to happen only at the end of a unit of work in this system so I wanted something that didn't rely on this.