EF Core 6.0: Introducing Pre-convention Model Configuration

In this post let's have a look at another feature EF Core 6.0 brings to the table.

Consider in your context, you have this specific type, and you want to maintain a similar configuration for that property throughout all your entities.

Let's go by a small example. Say I have multiple decimal properties in my entities, and I want all of them to be decimal(18,4) instead of decimal(18,2) which is the default.

public class OrderItem
{
    public int Id { get; set; }
 
    public int OrderId { get; set; }
 
    public decimal Amount { get; set; }
 
    public decimal Discount { get; set; }
}

Here I have two decimal properties in the same Entity. If I want to configure these to be decimal(18,4), I need to update the configuration for each property.

EF Core 6.0 exposes this new method ConfigureConventions(ModelConfigurationBuilder configurationBuilder) in DbContext which we can now override.

protected override void ConfigureConventions(ModelConfigurationBuilder configurationBuilder)
{
    configurationBuilder
       .Properties<decimal>()
       .HavePrecision(18, 4);
}

And if we create a migration for this, we can see EF is using decimal(18,4) for all my decimal properties without me having to configure for each of the properties. 

ConfigureConventions

And of course, if you want, you can still override this behavior per property.

protected override void OnModelCreating(ModelBuilder modelBuilder)
{
    // other configuration
 
    modelBuilder.Entity<OrderItem>(builder =>
    {
        builder
            .Property(x => x.Discount)
            .HasPrecision(18, 2);
    });
}

And if you add in a migration now,

Override per property

You can see only for the Discount property Scale is changed.

There are other great use cases, you can read more on,
   Pre-convention model configuration

Happy Coding.

Regards,

Jaliya