dreaded "Ids can not be autogenerated for entities with multipart keys"

Question

Ok I’m at a loss, being new to breeze I’m still learning the ropes. My project uses the hot towel template for AngularJs and breeze from John Papa.

He's what I’m trying to achieve: I have a master\slave tables in my database. An "Agency" has many people it can "Notify". Here are the EF classes for the server side:

public class Agency {

    public Agency() {  
    this.Notifies = new HashSet<Notify>();
   }

   public long Id { get; set; }

   [Required, MaxLength(50)]
   public string Name { get; set; }
   <<removed unneeded details>>
   public bool Active { get; set; }

   public virtual ICollection<Notify> Notifies { get; set; }
}   

public class Notify
{
   public long Id { get; set; }
   public long? AgencyId { get; set; }
   public string Name { get; set; }
   <<removed unneeded details>>

   public virtual Agency Agency { get; set; }
}

Now the Maps:

public class AgencyMaps : EntityTypeConfiguration<Agency>
{
   internal AgencyMaps()
   {
     HasKey(x => x.Id);
   }
}

public class NotifyMap : EntityTypeConfiguration<Notify>
{
   internal NotifyMap()
   {
      HasKey(x => x.Id);

      HasOptional(x => x.Agency)
         .WithMany(p => p.Notifies)
         .HasForeignKey(i => i.AgencyId);
   }
}

Now on the client side I use breeze to create new entities like this:

// create a new entity
function create() {
  return manager.createEntity(entityName);
}
// create a new notify entity
function createNotify(){
    return manager.createEntity(entityNameNotify);
}

Then there are two scenarios I need to achieve: - First is where I retrieve an existing agency and add additional people to notify - Second is where I create a new agency and add people to notify

Both fail in the same place.

Note: I’m using SQL server and my Id fields are bigint (long) at this point in time.

I’m retrieving the “Agency” entity and placing it in a variable called “vm.agency”. “vm.agency” has a navigation called “notifies” with an entity type of “Notify”. So when I want to create and add a new person I’m calling this function:

function addNotifyRec(){
   if (vm.agency !== undefined){
      var notifyRec = datacontext.agency.createNotify(); //<<< fails here
      notifyRec.agencyId = vm.agency.id;
      notifyRec.name = vm.notify.name;
      <<removed unneeded details>>
      vm.agency.notifies.push(notifyRec);
      logSuccess(“New person to notify added”);
   }
   else
   { logError(“Agency is undefined”); }
}

As soon as the createNotify() is called I get the “Ids can not be autogenerated for entities with multipart keys” error.

So I’m stuck. It seems to me this is a pretty common scenario. I am obviously not understanding the breeze framework well enough to implement this. If you can point me in the right directions I’d appreciate your help.

UPDATE 4/9/2014 I'm thinking i could eliminate this issue altogether if i switch over to guid id and generate them client side. Is this correct thinking?

Answer 1

I took a different approach on working around my issue. Since i have the luxury to change out the id types, i swapped out the bigint ids to Uuid types and removed the auto generation of the ids in sql. Now i'm just creating my own ids using breeze.core.getUuid() when a new record is created. Not sure this is the most efficient way to work around the issue, but it seems to be working fine.

Answer 2

What's interesting here is that Breeze thinks that Notify.Id and Notify.AgencyId are multi part primary keys but they are actually not. Id is a PK and AgencyId is an FK. The only thing that I can think of is try removing the EntityTypeConfiguration for both Agency and Notify, specifically the part where it specifies HasKey and HasForeignKey. This Fluent API configuration shouldn't be required as EF will match your configuration by convention instead.