I'm wondering why there is no Detach method on the DbContext object like there is for ObjectContext. Â I can only assume this omission was intentional, but I have a hard time figuring out why. Â I need to be able to detach and re-attach entities (for putting in the cache in an ASP.NET project, for example). Â However, since I can't detach an entity, when I try to attach an entity that was associated with a previous context, I get the "An entity object cannot be referenced by multiple instances of IEntityChangeTracker" exception.
What's the guidance here? Â Am I missing something?
For people that might stumble upon this question, as of CTP5 you now need to write
((IObjectContextAdapter)context).ObjectContext
in order to get to ObjectContext.
DbContext uses an ObjectContext internally and EF team make this available as a protected property just in case you ever need to drop down to the lower level API and sounds like this is the case here, so you can use or expose the required functionality from a derived DbContext:
public class YourContext : DbContext
{
public void Detach(object entity)
{
ObjectContext.Detach(entity);
}
}
Then you can call this method from your controller to detach an entity.
Alternatively, you can change it to even have a richer API:
public class YourContext : DbContext
{
public void ChangeObjectState(object entity, EntityState entityState)
{
ObjectContext.ObjectStateManager.ChangeObjectState(entity, entityState);
}
}
Here is how DbContext looks like from metadata:
public class DbContext : IDisposable
{
protected System.Data.Objects.ObjectContext ObjectContext { get; }
...
}