EF Code First "Invalid column name 'Discriminator'" but no inheritance

Question

Turns out that Entity Framework will assume that any class that inherits from a POCO class that is mapped to a table on the database requires a Discriminator column, even if the derived class will not be saved to the DB.

The solution is quite simple and you just need to add [NotMapped] as an attribute of the derived class.

Example:

class Person
{
    public string Name { get; set; }
}

[NotMapped]
class PersonViewModel : Person
{
    public bool UpdateProfile { get; set; }
}

Now, even if you map the Person class to the Person table on the database, a "Discriminator" column will not be created because the derived class has [NotMapped].

As an additional tip, you can use [NotMapped] to properties you don't want to map to a field on the DB.

Here is the Fluent API syntax.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/adonet/archive/2010/12/06/ef-feature-ctp5-fluent-api-samples.aspx

class Person
{
    public string FirstName { get; set; }
    public string LastName { get; set; }
    public string FullName { 
        get {
            return this.FirstName + " " + this.LastName;
        }
    }
}

class PersonViewModel : Person
{
    public bool UpdateProfile { get; set; }
}


protected override void OnModelCreating(DbModelBuilder modelBuilder)
{
    // ignore a type that is not mapped to a database table
    modelBuilder.Ignore<PersonViewModel>();

    // ignore a property that is not mapped to a database column
    modelBuilder.Entity<Person>()
        .Ignore(p => p.FullName);

}

I just encountered this and my problem was caused by having two entities both with the System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations.Schema.TableAttribute referring to the same table.

for example:

[Table("foo")]
public class foo
{
    // some stuff here
}

[Table("foo")]
public class fooExtended
{
    // more stuff here
}

changing the second one from foo to foo_extended fixed this for me and I'm now using Table Per Type (TPT)

Another scenario where this occurs is when you have a base class and one or more subclasses, where at least one of the subclasses introduce extra properties:

class Folder {
  [key]
  public string Id { get; set; }

  public string Name { get; set; }
}

// Adds no props, but comes from a different view in the db to Folder:
class SomeKindOfFolder: Folder {
}

// Adds some props, but comes from a different view in the db to Folder:
class AnotherKindOfFolder: Folder {
  public string FolderAttributes { get; set; }
}

If these are mapped in the DbContext like below, the "'Invalid column name 'Discriminator'" error occurs when any type based on Folder base type is accessed:

protected override void OnModelCreating(DbModelBuilder modelBuilder)
{
  modelBuilder.Entity<Folder>().ToTable("All_Folders");
  modelBuilder.Entity<SomeKindOfFolder>().ToTable("Some_Kind_Of_Folders");
  modelBuilder.Entity<AnotherKindOfFolder>().ToTable("Another_Kind_Of_Folders");
}

I found that to fix the issue, we extract the props of Folder to a base class (which is not mapped in OnModelCreating()) like so - OnModelCreating should be unchanged:

class FolderBase {
  [key]
  public string Id { get; set; }

  public string Name { get; set; }
}

class Folder: FolderBase {
}

class SomeKindOfFolder: FolderBase {
}

class AnotherKindOfFolder: FolderBase {
  public string FolderAttributes { get; set; }
}

This eliminates the issue, but I don't know why!