I have just been banging my head against a wall trying to get a simple database record added to a simple table using Entity Framework! My table has a primary key field of type INT, but is NOT set as an identity field (i.e. Not set to increment SQL server side). I wanted the ability to set the Id in code.

An example would be a model like:

public Contact
{
    [Key]
    public int Id { get; set; }
    public string Name { get; set; }
}

then you would normally expect the standard EF code like this to work

var myNewContact = new Contact
{
    Id = 123,
    Name = "John Smith"
}
DataContext.Contacts.Add(myNewContact);
DataContext.SaveChanges();

However it always came back with the a DbUpdateException stating

“Cannot insert the value NULL into column ‘Id’, table ‘MyDatabase.dbo.Contacts’; column does not allow nulls. INSERT fails.”

It turns out that Entity Framework assumes that an integer [Key] field will always be generated server side. Maybe I should have known this, but actually found it very hard to locate this bit of information.

Once you know this the fix is very straight forward. You just need to decorate your model object with

[Key, DatabaseGenerated(DatabaseGeneratedOption.None)]

so the model above becomes:

public Contact
{
    [Key, DatabaseGenerated( DatabaseGeneratedOption.None )]
    public int Id { get; set; }
    public string Name { get; set; }
}

I hope this saves someone wasting as much time and loosing as much hair as I did on this simple issue!

One reason it took so long, is that I can’t get Entity Framework Profiler working with the Azure Emulator. If any has had any success with this, please let me know.