Entity Framework on delete cascade

Question

I have problem with deleting related rows in Entity Framework 4.1. I have tables with relations

Book 1<--->* BookFormats

I have set the on delete cascade:

ALTER TABLE [dbo].[BookFormats]  WITH CHECK ADD  CONSTRAINT [FK_BookFormats_Book] 
FOREIGN KEY([BookID]) REFERENCES [dbo].[Book] ([BookID]) on delete cascade

The EDMX property

Then, I want to remove the all BokFormats items related to my Book object:

 var originalBook = m.db.Book.First(x => x.BookID == bookId);
 originalBook.BookFormats.Clear();
 m.db.SaveChanges();

But, I get the error:

The operation failed: The relationship could not be changed because one or more of the foreign-key properties is non-nullable. When a change is made to a relationship, the related foreign-key property is set to a null value. If the foreign-key does not support null values, a new relationship must be defined, the foreign-key property must be assigned another non-null value, or the unrelated object must be deleted.

I ran out of ideas on how to delete these objects. Any ideas?

Answer 1

You can use RemoveRange :

m.db.BookFormats.RemoveRange(originalBook.BookFormats);
m.db.SaveChanges();

But this is for EF 6.0

Answer 2

Cascade deletions concept is as follows:

When you delete Book from the DB all related BookFormats will be deleted for you by SQL Server (please note that it doesn't matter how deletion of Book will be initiated via EF or raw SQL). Thus it has nothing to do with your task: "I want to delete all BookFormats related to my Book". To accomplish it you need something like this:

foreach(var m in m.db.BookFormats.Where(f=>f.BookID == bookID))
{
    m.db.BookFormats.Remove(m);
}
m.db.SaveChanges();