From time to time, it is nice to store complex objects or lists as JSON in the database. With Entity Framework 8, this is now easily possible. But this was possible all along with Entity Framework 7.
Entity Framework 8
What is possible since the latest version of Entity Framework (8) is to store lists of simple types as JSON. So, if you have a model like this:
public class BlogPost
{
public int Id { get; set; }
public string Title { get; set; }
public List<string> Tags { get; set; }
}
Imagine the following blog post:
var post = new BlogPost
{
Title = "Entity Framework 8",
Tags = new List<string> { "Entity Framework", "EF8", "JSON" }
};
Then the tags will be stored as: '["Entity Framework", "EF8", "JSON"]' in the database. Okay - that is very handy. But there are other news to Entity Framework 8: You can also store complex objects as owned types! So if you have a model like this:
public class BlogPost
{
public int Id { get; set; }
public string Title { get; set; }
public List<string> Tags { get; set; }
public Author Author { get; set; }
}
public class Author
{
public string Name { get; set; }
public string Email { get; set; }
}
Then in Entity Framework 8 you can configure this in your mapping as:
modelBuilder.Entity<BlogPost>()
.OwnsOne(p => p.Author);
Which creates column names like 'Author_Name' and 'Author_Email' in the database. Nice: Value objects are now first class citizens in Entity Framework.
Complex objects as JSON
But what if you want to store the author as JSON? This is also possible with Entity Framework. And not only since version 8, but since version 7 (well, technically since forever, as you can use ValueConverters):
modelBuilder.Entity<BlogPost>()
.OwnsOne(p => p.Author, b => b.ToJson());
This will result in a column named 'Author' in the database, which contains the JSON representation of the author. The cool thing is, that this also allows filtering, sorting and so on!
