Naming Conventions for Entity Framework Core Tables and Columns
By default, EF Core will map to tables and columns named exactly after your .NET classes and properties. For example, mapping a typical Customer class to PostgreSQL will result in SQL such as the following:
CREATE TABLE "Customers" (
"Id" integer NOT NULL GENERATED BY DEFAULT AS IDENTITY,
"FullName" text NULL,
CONSTRAINT "PK_Customers" PRIMARY KEY ("Id")
);
SELECT c."Id", c."FullName"
FROM "Customers" AS c
WHERE c."FullName" = 'John Doe';
For PostgreSQL specifically, this forces double-quotes to be added since unquoted identifiers are automatically converted to lower-case - and all those quotes are an eye-sore. But even if we're using another database such as SQL Server, maybe we just hate seeing upper-case letters in our database, and would rather have another naming convention.
Down with same-name identifier tyranny! Simply add a reference to EFCore.NamingConventions and enable a naming convention in your model's OnConfiguring
method:
protected override void OnConfiguring(DbContextOptionsBuilder optionsBuilder)
=> optionsBuilder
.UseNpgsql(...)
.UseSnakeCaseNamingConvention();
This will automatically make all your table and column names have snake_case naming:
CREATE TABLE customers (
id integer NOT NULL GENERATED BY DEFAULT AS IDENTITY,
full_name text NULL,
CONSTRAINT "pk_customers" PRIMARY KEY (id)
);
SELECT c.id, c.full_name
FROM customers AS c
WHERE c.full_name = 'John Doe';
Supported naming conventions
- UseSnakeCaseNamingConvention:
FullName
becomesfull_name
- UseLowerCaseNamingConvention:
FullName
becomesfullname
- UseCamelCaseNamingConvention:
FullName
becomesfullName
- UseUpperCaseNamingConvention:
FullName
becomesFULLNAME
- UseUpperSnakeCaseNamingConvention:
FullName
becomesFULL_NAME
Have another naming convention in mind? Open an issue or even submit a PR - it's pretty easy to do!
Important notes
- If you have an existing database, adding this naming convention will cause a migration to produced, renaming everything. Be very cautious when doing this (the process currently involves dropping and recreating primary keys).
- This plugin will work with any relational database provider and isn't related to PostgreSQL or Npgsql in any way.
- This is a community-maintained plugin: it isn't an official part of Entity Framework Core and isn't supported by Microsoft in any way.