Linq to Entities and POCO foreign key relations mapping (1 to 0..1) problem

Posted by brainnovative on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by brainnovative
Published on 2010-04-14T04:58:25Z Indexed on 2010/04/14 5:03 UTC
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For my ASP.NET MVC 2 application I use Entity Framework 1.0 as my data access layer (repository). But I decided I want to return POCO. For the first time I have encountered a problem when I wanted to get a list of Brands with their optional logos. Here's what I did:

public IQueryable<Model.Products.Brand> GetAll()
    {
        IQueryable<Model.Products.Brand> brands = from b in EntitiesCtx.Brands.Include("Logo")
                                                  select new Model.Products.Brand()
                                                         {
                                                             BrandId = b.BrandId,
                                                             Name = b.Name,
                                                             Description = b.Description,
                                                             IsActive = b.IsActive,
                                                             Logo = /*b.Logo != null ? */new Model.Cms.Image()
                                                                    {
                                                                        ImageId = b.Logo.ImageId,
                                                                        Alt = b.Logo.Alt,
                                                                        Url = b.Logo.Url
                                                                    }/* : null*/
                                                         };
        return brands;
    }

You can see in the comments what I would like to achieve. It worked fine whenever a Brand had a Logo otherwise it through an exception that you can assign null to the non-nullable type int (for Id). My workaround was to use nullable in the POCO class but that's not natural - then I have to check not only if Logo is null in my Service layer or Controllers and Views but mostly for Logo.ImageId.HasValue. It's not justified to have a non null Logo property if the id is null.

Can anyone think of a better solution?

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