Exploring Entity Framework Core 1.0.0 RTM Changes Understanding a breaking change in the update method behaviour between RC1 and RTM

It’s been a while since my last post but finally I’ve found some time to get this one together, albeit a shorter post this time around.

Outside of my day job, when time permits I like to code for the open source charity project, allReady. This ASP.NET Core web application has been developed during the betas of .NET Core through to RC1. Recently with the help of the very knowledgeable Shawn Wildermuth, the project has been upgraded to run against the final 1.0.0 RTM version of .NET core.

In this post I’m going to talk about one specific change in Entity Framework Core 1.0.0 between RC1 and RTM which caused some breaks in our code.

Before diving into the issue, I need to briefly explain the structure of our code. We have been working to move a lot of our database logic in allReady into Mediatr handlers. This has proven to be a great way to separate the concerns and split up the logic. Our controllers can send messages (commands or queries) via Mediatr to perform actions against the database. The controller have no dependencies on the database layers and therefore are nice and slim. If you want to read more about how we’ve used this pattern, I covered Mediatr in my previous blog post. For this post, we’ll be looking at the code in a particular handler. The code we’re looking at is not handler specific, I point it out just in case the class seems a little confusing as to where it fits into our project. We’ll focus in on a few specific lines of code within the hander.

In a number of places within our code we need to handle the creation or update of an record stored in the database. For example, we have the concept of Itineraries. In allReady an itinerary represents a series of work items (requests) that are grouped together in order to be worked on by volunteers.

In our .NET Core RC1 code base we had the following handler:

public class EditItineraryCommandHandlerAsync : IAsyncRequestHandler<EditItineraryCommand, int>
{
	private readonly AllReadyContext _context;

	public EditItineraryCommandHandlerAsync(AllReadyContext context)
	{
		_context = context;
	}

	public async Task<int> Handle(EditItineraryCommand message)
	{
		try
		{
			var itinerary = await GetItinerary(message) ?? new Itinerary();

			itinerary.Name = message.Itinerary.Name;
			itinerary.Date = message.Itinerary.Date;
			itinerary.EventId = message.Itinerary.EventId;

			_context.Update(itinerary);
			await _context.SaveChangesAsync().ConfigureAwait(false);

			return itinerary.Id;
		}
		catch (Exception)
		{
			// There was an error somewhere
			return 0;
		}
	}

	private async Task<Itinerary> GetItinerary(EditItineraryCommand message)
	{
		return await _context.Itineraries
			.SingleOrDefaultAsync(c => c.Id == message.Itinerary.Id)
			.ConfigureAwait(false);
	}
}

This handler is called from both the create and edit POST actions on our itinerary controller and is intended to handle both scenarios. Within the Handle method we first try to retrieve an existing itinerary based on the Id of the itinerary object being passed in as part of our message. If this does not return an existing itinerary we null coalesce and create a new empty Itinerary object. We then set the properties of our itinerary object based on those coming in via the message (populated by the user in the front end admin page). Then we call Update on the EF context, passing in the Itinerary object and finally call SaveChangesAsync to apply the changes to the database.

This is where things broke for us after beginning to use the RTM version of the EF Core library. During RC1 and prior, the Update method would check the value of the key property on the model and if it was determined it couldn’t be an existing record (i.e. an Id of zero in our case) then the Update method marked the object as Added in the dbContext change tracking, otherwise it would be set as Modified.

Between RC1 and RTM, the Entity Framework team have tightened up on the behaviour of the Update method and made it perform a little more rigidly. It now only performs the action implied by its name. Any object passed in will be marked as modified, even those objects with an Id of zero. It’s up to the caller to call this method correctly.

The resulting exception thrown when calling SaveChangesAsync (after adding a new record) when running against RTM code is…

Database operation expected to affect 1 row(s) but actually affected 0 row(s). Data may have been modified or deleted since entities were loaded. See http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=527962 for information on understanding and handling optimistic concurrency exceptions.

Essentially this tells us that we sent in an object marked as modified and EF therefore expected to get a count of 1 row being modified against the database. However, since the id on our new object is zero (this is a new record), it won’t match any existing records in the database and as such, no records are actually updated.

That explains the break we experienced. On reflection, the change makes sense as it avoids any assumptions being made by EF about our intentions. We’re calling update, so it marks the object as modified. We’re expected to use the Add method for new objects.

So, with the problem understood, what do we do about it? There were a number of possible options that I considered when putting in a fix for this issue. I won’t go into great detail here since ultimately I was directed to a very sensible and simple option which I’ll share in a few minutes, but at a high level we could have…

  1. Moved from a single shared handler to two separate handlers, one specifically for creating and one specifically for editing an Itinerary. In that case each handler would know whether to call either Add or Update explicitly. Note that Update in this case would not need to be called since the object is already tracked by the context after we get it from the database – more on that later!
  2. Added some logic within our own code to check if the Id is zero and if so, assume we want to Add the object to the context instead of Update.
  3. Utilised a context extension we have in the project which tries to determine whether to call Add or whether to call Update based on the EntityState of the object. This is similar to option 2, but would allow shared use of similar logic.

All three would have worked to some extent, although not without some possible further issues we’d have needed to address. However after opening an issue on the EF core GitHub repository to try to understand the change, Arthur Vickers suggested a much cleaner solution for our case.

Arthur proposed the following replacement code:

var itinerary = await GetItinerary(message) ?? _context.Add(new Itinerary()).Entity;

itinerary.Name = message.Itinerary.Name;
itinerary.Date = message.Itinerary.Date;
itinerary.EventId = message.Itinerary.EventId;

await _context.SaveChangesAsync().ConfigureAwait(false);

It’s a small but elegant change which actually only touches two lines.

First change:

var itinerary = await GetItinerary(message) ?? _context.Add(new Itinerary()).Entity;

What this now does is first try to get an itinerary as we had before. If we have this then the itinerary variable is set and we can change the values of the properties as required. It’s important to realise at this point that since we queried the db for this object, it’s now already being tracked by the context. As such, if we adjust properties on the object, EF will detect these changes and mark them as modified. We therefore would not need to call Update which has a different intended use case.

If we don’t get an existing record back from the query, then we’re working with a new record. In that case, the code above adds a new empty itinerary object to the context. Add returns an EntityEntry and we can use the .Entity property of that to return the actual entity object (an Itinerary). It is assigned to our local variable and we can then set its properties. Since the Add method on the context has already been called it is already being tracked by the context with an EntityState of added.

Second change:

We can remove the _context.Update(itinerary); line entirely. Since we now have a correctly tracked entity in the context after our first line (either modified or added) we don’t need to try and attach it at this stage. We have re-ordered the logic a little which makes things simpler and cleaner. We can just call SaveChangesAsync() which will send SQL commands to add or update as necessary, based on the change tracking information.

In Summary

This issue highlighted for me personally that I still need to think carefully about how EF works under the covers. I’ve tried to read a lot on EF Core and feel I have a better understanding of how it works at a medium-to-high level. In this case, our code took advantage of behaviour in EF RC1 which was in reality hiding a bit of an issue in our code. I don’t think the code was “bad” exactly, just that as we’ve explored, with a bit of thinking about the change tracking behaviour, we could improve our code. At the time of writing the original code using Update for both the add and edit scenario was valid, although perhaps a little naïve. We relied on EF correctly assessing our intention to mark the object with correct state.

When working with EF I think it’s important to have a basic understanding of how the change tracking works and what it does for us. If we query for a record via the context, than that record starts being tracked. We don’t need to expressly call update since the context is already aware of the object and the change tracker can manage any modified properties during SaveChanges.

Next steps

There is certainly more for me to personally learn about EF and its API in general. For example, in this case I learned about the Entity property that EF exposes on an EntityEntry. Beyond the basics EF core exposes many ways to manage the tracking of entities and those do warrant exploration and experimentation to find the right performance vs complexity balance for each scenario.

The above code still has room for improvement as well. One thing that stands out is that we are performing a db query to get an object, in order to update it and save it. This is slightly inefficient in our case. When building the edit page, we’ve already queried for the object to set the form fields in the UI. On our post we’re then querying again, purely to attach the object in it’s current state to the context. A pattern I’ve started using elsewhere for a more performant update is to manually attach an object and mark it’s properties as modified without the need to query it first. In this case, it may be unnecessarily complex in order to remove a pretty light db query, but as always, it’s worth considering.

My thanks go out to Arthur Vickers for his response to my EF issue. It’s extremely helpful being able to reach out to the team directly as we all learn the nuances of the changes in the .NET core libraries.


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Steve Gordon

Steve Gordon is a Pluralsight author, 6x Microsoft MVP, and a .NET engineer at Elastic where he maintains the .NET APM agent and related libraries. Steve is passionate about community and all things .NET related, having worked with ASP.NET for over 21 years. Steve enjoys sharing his knowledge through his blog, in videos and by presenting talks at user groups and conferences. Steve is excited to participate in the active .NET community and founded .NET South East, a .NET Meetup group based in Brighton. He enjoys contributing to and maintaining OSS projects. You can find Steve on most social media platforms as @stevejgordon

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