Get underlying entity object from entity framework proxy

Question

I have an entity by getting it from DbEntityEntry.Entity. This returns the Entity Framework proxy for the entity.

How do I access the underlying object as its original type instead of the proxy?

Alternatively I need to dynamically try to cast the proxy to the entity type. Here's a start.

var theEntityType = entityEntry.Entity;  if (     theEntityType.BaseType != null      && entityType.Namespace == "System.Data.Entity.DynamicProxies" )    theEntityType = entityType.BaseType;  // Now I need to cast to the correct type // THIS WON'T WORK BECAUSE `theEntityType` is dynamic. var entityObject = (theEntityType)entityEntry.Entity;  // My entites also don't implement IConvertible 

Answer 1

While working with EF 6 i used the following code to get the underlying POCO entity type from proxy type,

var entityType = ObjectContext.GetObjectType(dbEntitymodifiedEntry.Entity.GetType()); 

ObjectContext.GetObjectType : Return the POCO from proxy object

reference : https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/ef/ef6/fundamentals/proxies

Answer 2

First I should say there is no underlying object. A proxy doesn't wrap an entity object (decorator pattern), it derives from it (inheritance). So we can't unwrap the entity, we can only convert a proxy to a base object. Conversion (contrary to casting) always creates a new object.

For this conversion, we can exploit the fact that most of the time, by the way proxies are returned by EF, the compile time type of a proxy is the base type. That is, if a proxy is entered as an argument to a generic method, the generic parameter will be inferred as the base type. This feature allows us to create a method that does what you want:

T UnProxy<T>(DbContext context, T proxyObject) where T : class {     var proxyCreationEnabled = context.Configuration.ProxyCreationEnabled;     try     {         context.Configuration.ProxyCreationEnabled = false;         T poco = context.Entry(proxyObject).CurrentValues.ToObject() as T;         return poco;     }     finally     {         context.Configuration.ProxyCreationEnabled = proxyCreationEnabled;     } } 

Explanation

The proxy object enters the method. Its type is inferred as the base POCO type. Now we can temporarily turn off ProxyCreationEnabled on the context and copy the proxy object to an object of its base POCO type. This copy action gratefully uses a few EF features.