Question
After hours of searching, I am little bit disappointed. Can anybody confirm (or not) that using EF database-first approch (I mean, using the VS EDMX degigner) is possible with an existing Postgres SQL database?
Some requirements :
- I want to use ngsql provider because it is free (but I am not sure it is working in database-first approach)
- I don't want to use the Devart Connect provider because it is not free and it is for a personal project. I can consider the express version but I don't think it is working on design mode.
Cheers
Accepted Answer
Yes it is possible. A quick Google search found a walkthrough which did not suggest there were any special gotchas.
I will note I am quite sceptical of code first ORM frameworks as I think that they leave out key aspects of database design and thus encourage databases where no real planning for the future has occurred and so I think it is somewhat of a specialized tool, but the answer seems to be yes, it works.
Popular Answer
This question appears on most google searches for EF Database First with Postgres and the accepted answer directs to a walk-through on CODE first not DATABASE first so I'll add a pointer to this answer which got me most of the way to solving it:
PostgreSQL data provider missing from wizard in Visual Studio 2015
Essentially there is a Visual Studio extension for postgres (simply search in the extensions and updates for Postgres) but I also had to modify the entity framework node in my app.config as it was added before I installed the extension to look like this:
<entityFramework>
<defaultConnectionFactory type="System.Data.Entity.Infrastructure.SqlConnectionFactory, EntityFramework" />
<providers>
<provider invariantName="System.Data.SqlClient" type="System.Data.Entity.SqlServer.SqlProviderServices, EntityFramework.SqlServer" />
<provider invariantName="Npgsql" type="Npgsql.NpgsqlServices, EntityFramework6.Npgsql" />
</providers>
</entityFramework>
This added npgsql as a data provider and after I did this the data provider appears in the EF Database first wizard as an option.
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