Managing entity state

Setting state Added of a single entity

EntityState.Added can be set in two fully equivalent ways:

By setting the state of its entry in the context:

 context.Entry(entity).State = EntityState.Added;

By adding it to a `DbSet` of the context:

 context.Entities.Add(entity);

When calling SaveChanges, the entity will be inserted into the database. When it's got an identity column (an auto-set, auto-incrementing primary key), then after SaveChanges, the primary key property of the entity will contain the newly generated value, even when this property already had a value.

Setting state Added of an object graph

Setting the state of an object graph (a collection of related entities) to Added is different than setting a single entity as Added (see this example (opens new window)).

In the example, we store planets and their moons:

Class model

public class Planet
{
    public Planet()
    {
        Moons = new HashSet<Moon>();
    }
    public int ID { get; set; }
    public string Name { get; set; }
    public ICollection<Moon> Moons { get; set; }
}

public class Moon
{
    public int ID { get; set; }
    public int PlanetID { get; set; }
    public string Name { get; set; }
}

Context

public class PlanetDb : DbContext
{
    public property DbSet<Planet> Planets { get; set; }
}

We use an instance of this context to add planets and their moons:

Example

var mars = new Planet { Name = "Mars" };
mars.Moons.Add(new Moon { Name = "Phobos" });
mars.Moons.Add(new Moon { Name = "Deimos" });

context.Planets.Add(mars);

Console.WriteLine(context.Entry(mars).State);
Console.WriteLine(context.Entry(mars.Moons.First()).State);

Output:

Added
Added

What we see here is that adding a Planet also sets the state of a moon to Added.

When setting an entity's state to Added, all entities in its navigation properties (properties that "navigate" to other entities, like Planet.Moons) are also marked as Added, unless they already are attached to the context.

Remarks

Entities in Entity Framework can have various states that are listed by the System.Data.Entity.EntityState (opens new window) enumeration. These states are:

Added    
Deleted    
Detached    
Modified    
Unchanged

Entity Framework works with POCOs. That means that entities are simple classes that have no properties and methods to manage their own state. Entity state is managed by a context itself, in the ObjectStateManager.

This topic covers various ways to set entity state.