Entity Framework Code First - Visualizing Generated Model & Database

Aren't we always curious about finding out how model is generated from the entities we have defined in Code First. Since there are so many conventions involved, it always seems difficult to go to the database and see individual tables. Well, there are different ways which could make our life easier to understand the database generated and even the resulting model by the code first entities. Let's discuss about them.

This discussion would discuss how we can get a complete picture of the related entities in a Context and resulting database without. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. So, definitely, this would make our life easier to be managing those entities, their relationship and resulting databases.

1. Database Diagrams
2. Viewing Entity Data Model using Visual Studio Integration
3. Generating model using EdmxWriter

Database Diagrams
Most SQL Client tools allow creation of diagrams for existing tables. We just need to reverse engineer the database and select the tables we need. In the diagram, we can see the details of the selected tables. We can also see the foreign key relationships between them. SQL Server Management Studio also has such support. Just right click the Database Diagrams folder under your database in Object Explorer and select New Database Diagram.

You should see following dialog providing the list of all the tables in the database. Here you can select all the tables that you want to include in the diagram and click Add button. For our database, we should see the following list of tables.

As we hit the button, a new database diagram is created and shown. It has the tables as selected in the previous step. It also has the foreign key relationship details between the selected tables.

Visualizing Model using Entity Framework Power Tools
We can also visualize the expected model during design time using Entity Framework Power Tools. It is a Visual Studio Extension which can be installed using online extension library download feature of Visual Studio as follows:

After installation, if you select a class file in the solution explorer the following context menu is displayed allowing the view of the expected model.

If the selected file contains a sub-class of DbContext then it generates a read-only model listing all the entities as expected to be generated at run-time.

Persisting Generated model as *.edmx file
We can also support persisting the generated model at run-time. Entity Framework ... has added a new type to the framework just to support this requirement. This is called EdmxWriter. It can use an XmlWriter to persist the generated model as in the below code:

using (var context = new InstituteEntities())
{
    XmlWriterSettings settings = new XmlWriterSettings();
    settings.Indent = true;

    using (XmlWriter writer = XmlWriter.Create(@"Model.edmx", settings))
    {
        EdmxWriter.WriteEdmx(context, writer);
    }
}

Here XmlWriter and XmlWriterSettings are from System.Xml namespace. You would be needing to import the namespace in the class file before using them. After the above code is executed, we should see Model.edmx file created in the output directory.

We can view this file in Entity Designer in Visual Studio.