I'm trying to understand the Entity Framework, and I have a table "Users" and a table "Pages". These are related in a many-to-many relationship with a junction table "UserPages". First of all I'd like to know if I'm designing this relationship correctly using many-to-many: One user can visit multiple pages, and each page can be visited by multiple users..., so am I right in using many2many?

Secondly, and more importantly, as I have understood m2m relationships, the User and Page tables should not repeat information. I.e. there should be only one record for each user and each page. But then in the entity framework, how am I able to add new visits to the same page for the same user? That is, I was thinking I could simply use the Count() method on the IEnumerable returned by a LINQ query to get the number of times a user has visited a certain page.

But I see no way of doing that. In Linq to Sql I could access the junction table and add records there to reflect added visits to a certain page by a certain user, as many times as necessary. But in the EF I can't access the junction table. I can only go from User to a Pages collection and vice versa.

I'm sure I'm misunderstanding relationships or something, but I just can't figure out how to model this. I could always have a Count column in the Page table, but as far as I have understood you're not supposed to design database tables like that, those values should be collected by queries...

Please help me understand what I'm doing wrong...