EF Power Tools generates no views for relationships

Question

(Not new to SO, but new to asking questions, so pardon mistakes. Thanks.)

I used EF Power Tools to pre-generate views, but then I saw "return null;" at the end of the following method of the generated class, and so I wanted to find out when (or if) GetView actually returns null.

Here's the method:

    /// <summary>
    /// Gets a view corresponding to the specified extent.
    /// </summary>
    /// <param name="extent">The extent.</param>
    /// <returns>The mapping view, or null if the extent is not associated with a mapping view.</returns>
    public override DbMappingView GetView(EntitySetBase extent)
    {
        if (extent == null)
        {
            throw new ArgumentNullException("extent");
        }

        var extentName = extent.EntityContainer.Name + "." + extent.Name;

       //...

       if (extentName == "CodeFirstDatabase.Post")
        {
            return GetView22();
        }

        if (extentName == "CodeFirstDatabase.PostComment")
        {
            return GetView23();
        }

        //...

        return null;
    }

Here are my models:

public class Post
{
    public Post()
    {
        comments = new HashSet<PostComment>();
    }

    //...

    [InverseProperty("post")]
    public virtual ICollection<PostComment> comments { get; set; }

    //...
}

public class PostComment
{
    [Key]
    [DatabaseGenerated(DatabaseGeneratedOption.None)]
    [ForeignKey("comment")]
    public long comment_id { get; set; }
    public Post comment { get; set; }

    [ForeignKey("post")]
    public long post_id { get; set; }
    [InverseProperty("comments")]
    public Post post { get; set; }
}

My posts and comments have the same model (after all, they just store text). I use the PostComment model to group the comments in a separate table so that queries on comments could be faster as they do not include actual posts.

Setting breakpoints on the "return null;" line of the GetView method gets me "CodeFirstDatabase.PostComment_comment" for the extentName, which I think refers to the comment foreign key on PostComment model. Of course, it returned that null as EF Power Tool did not generate a view for it.

My questions are:

Why didn't EF Power Tools generate a view for that relationship (or any other relationships)?
Will returning null make EF to generate the view itself at runtime?
If yes to 2, will this impact startup time for first query?

As a related fourth question, why is the name "CodeFirstDatabase" used alongside the actual context name in the view generation?

I'm using EntityFramework 6.1.3 btw.

EF Power Tools generates no views for relationships

0 Answers0