Marking a Value Object with the Entity Framework [ComplexType] causes the data of the Value Object to be saved to the same database row as the entity. Consider Product, which is backed by the ProductState object. The Ubiquitous Language is not really reinforced by using interfaces such as IProduct, IBacklogItem, etc. Not only that but you are adding in extra code and creating a custom API that any new developer is going to have to learn. They are immutable. The objective of … Most of the writings and articles on this topic have been based on Eric Evans' book "Domain Driven Design", covering the domain modeling and design aspects mainly from a conceptual and design stand-point. This is technically the kind of primary key that Entity Framework wants to work with. Using an example from my book, a set of well-designed Aggregates are shown in Figure 3. The Separated Interface named IProduct is implemented by a concrete domain object. Your email address will not be published. An object fundamentally defined not by its attributes, but by a thread of continuity and identity. Vaughn Vernon is a software developer and architect with more than 30 years of experience in a broad range of business domains. An entity is different from a Value Object primarily due to the fact that an Entity has an identity while a Value Object … My understanding of term Entity is influenced by Eric Evans (DDD). ... a Factory refers to an object that has the single responsibility of creating other objects. We have two Product constructors; a public business constructor for normal clients and a second internal constructor that is used only by internal implementation components: When the business constructor is invoked we create a new ProductState object and initialize it. Hmm, I wonder, instead of recomputing the HashCode on each invocation of GetHashCode, could you instead create a Lazy inside the method and only compute the object’s hash code the first time GetHashCode is called? In fact, you may not realize the purpose of the article unless you begin reading with the assumed attitude that “I hate O-R mapping.” The O-R mapping tooling is actually something like 20+ years old, and it is time that we come up with more practical solutions to storing objects as objects. By keeping state objects separate from the domain-driven implementation objects, it enables very simple mappings. To clarify the meaning of model elements and propose a set of design practices, Domain-Driven Design defines three patterns that express the model: Entities, Value Objects and Services. In the end our goal is to stay out of the way of Entity Framework and make it super simple to map state objects in and out of the database. The following code example shows the simplest approach to validation in a domain entity by raising an exception. In Martin’s seminal P of EAA book (2002), a Domain Model is defined as ‘an object model of the domain that incorporates both behavior and data’. A popular gimmick I’ve seen is interviewing a Person with a famous name (but … I am hoping that this post helps to explain some of the more foundational artifacts of DDD, namely Entities. 2. Vaughn is the author of three books: Implementing Domain-Driven Design, Reactive Messaging Patterns with the Actor Model, and Domain-Driven Design Distilled, all published by Addison-Wesley. This is not something you would typically do. In Object Oriented Programming, we represent related attributes and methods as an Object.So for example, a Person could be an Object within our application. The only way to create or update entity data is constructors (ctors), factories or methods in the entity class. The common dictionary definition of domain is: “A In this case, ProductOwnerId would be saved to the same database row as the ProductState entity. In the meantime we should just do as little O-R mapping as we can get away with. We create an interface that we want our client to see and we hide the implementation details inside the implementing class. Everyone knows the built in types and methods that ship with .NET, only you know all of your amazing helper methods. An entity will always have a unique identifier. Entity: An object that is identified ... ensuring that the client has no knowledge of the inner-workings of object manipulation. These writings discuss the main elements of DDD such as Entity, Value Object, Service etc or they talk about concepts like Ubiquitous Language, Bounded Context and Anti-Corruption Layer. Entity; Value Object; Domain Service; Domain Event; DDD Refference より一部抜粋 "Express Model With"と書かれている4つ. The parts are: Setting the scene – what DDD says about object design and persistence; A look at what a DDD-styled entity class looks like Comparing creating a new instance of a DDD-styled entity class Anyways, the point here is not that we have a mutable VO, but why I've considered the Orderline a VO instead of an Entity? and value the. [NOTE: As expected, this article has within hours of posting received some criticism for the approach used to O-R mapping with Entity Framework. By convention Entity Framework will name the table ValueObject_PropertyName when running migrations and will look for this when mapping. Complex types are non-scalar values that do not have keys and cannot be managed apart from their containing entity, or the complex type within which they are nested. This is encapsulation: one of the 4 principles of Object-oriented programming.Encapsulation is an act of data integrity; and that's especially important in domain-modeling. If it has real meaning in the domain and helps to better translate the business by turning a DateOfBirth into a value object, then by all means go for it. If you follow my KISS guidance you can mostly ignore your Entity Framework documentation and how-to books. The values of a value object must be immutable once the object is created. It might help, if you have a team of developers working on … This is part of the Domain-Driven Design w/ TypeScript & Node.js course. Domain-driven design is predicated on the following goals: placing the project's primary focus on the core domain and domain logic; basing complex designs on a model For example: int? I contrast it to a Value Object. By keeping state objects separate from the domain-driven implementation objects, it enables very simple mappings. Figure 1 illustrates two such consistency boundaries, with two different Aggregates. He consults and teaches around Domain-Driven Design and reactive software development, helping teams and organizations realize the potential of business-driven and reactive systems as they transition from technology-driven legacy web implementation approaches. You’ll see I’m setting HasColumn name to override that convention. I am often asked that question. Onion is an architectural pattern for a system, whereas DDD is a way to design a subset of the objects in the system. If we need to update the address of an entity then we will need to create a new Address value object. When two or more Aggregates have at least some dependencies on updates, use eventual consistency. The topic described in this article is a part of my Domain-Driven Design in Practice Pluralsight course. Related. For example, the following implementation would leave the object in an invalid state… The best reason we have for creating a Separated Interface is when there could be or are multiple implementations, and is just not going to happen in this Core Domain. An object is not a VO because it's immutable and it's not an Entity just because you have a property Id (similar a class named Repository is not really a repository). So, thanks for your words of advice, but I have done everything below with precise intent.]. An Entity has a meaningful identity, whereas a Value Object does not. I mean, Value Objects are supposed to be immutable anyway, so if anything about the Value Object changes, then a new Value Object ought to be created, and therefore, a new HashCode would need to be generated for the new instance. If you browse through this post too quickly some of the key words of wisdom and my intent may be lost on your speed reading. This points to the need for a few simple converters, which are used by the Product Aggregate root: Here we convert a collection of ProductBacklogItemState instances to a collection of ProductBacklogItem instances. This is the only way to work in procedural languages like C. So putting the differen… Two Aggregates, which represent two transactional consistency boundaries. I’d like to discuss the fundamental flaws that I see in it: Based on these two points alone I would personally choose to abandon this approach before going any further with it. How do you formulate the Domain Model in Domain Driven Design properly (Bounded Contexts, Domains)? Identity and lookup. Unlike entities, which have an Id, our Address value object has no identity, and the equality implementation is done entirely on the properties. requestedHashCode; In the GetHashCode method, they look to see if requestedHashCode.HasValue is false, and if so, then compute and store the hashcode. Lets discuss that next. But as long as the Value Object remains unchanged, so too does its hash code. In many systems you’ll either see the properties of address as primitives in the Employee, or they’ll be placed in a separate table, given identity, and pulled with a join. If you see that a concept in your domain model doesn’t have its own identity, choose to treat that concept as a Value Object. Figure 2. Vaughn is a leading expert in Domain-Driven Design, and a champion of simplicity and reactive systems. This is what will allow Entity Framework to perform the mapping. In Domain-Driven Design, Value Objects are one of two primitive concepts that help us to create rich and encapsulated domain models. Here are the base types for all Identity types of Value Objects: So, the ProductState object stands on its own when it comes to persisting the state of the Product. IProduct and IBacklogItem are not in our Ubiquitous Language, but Product and BacklogItem are. The domain object that models the Aggregate behavior is backed by a state object that holds the model’s state. Side Note: If you search the internet you’ll see a lot of code where the domain entity has a single State property containing the memento object, and all methods update that memento object. When we model the domain we typically think in terms of entities which are then persisted and modified over time. The ProductBacklogItemState object must only support a few simple conversion methods: Should the client ask repeatedly for a collection of ProductBacklogItem instances the Product could cache the collection after the first time it is generated. It may not be entirely clear when a value object should be used and why. Why? If C# delivers the new Record struct someday, we may be able to forego the manually implemented base class entirely. However, it is different from the ProductId, which when combined with the TenantId is the business identity. https://github.com/SeanLeitzinger/Entity-Framework-Core-Examples, https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/whats-new/csharp-9#record-types, The Repository Pattern is Dead If You Use Entity Framework. If you’re still using straigh... © 2020 Edgeside Solutions LLC, All Rights Reserved, DDD Value Objects With Entity Framework Core. We must still support client requests for TenantId and ProductId from the Product: The ProductState object must support both DecodeProductId() and DecodeTenantId() methods. There is such a thing as over engineering the code and no amount of blog posts about turning everything into a value object is going to change that. Only an object representing a Domain concept can be classified as an Entity (it has an id) or a VO (it encapsulates a simple or composite value). This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google. Threading was handled (naively, for the most part) by the container. I am purposely avoiding some of the expert guidance that is typically given with a view to deep understanding of Entity Framework mappings. These are based on true business rules that require specific data to be up-to-date at the end of a successful database transaction. 0. I wrote about entities and value objects some time ago. Whether you stick with the default naming or override it is more a matter of preference than best practice. From Evans: In traditional object-oriented design, you might start modeling by identifying nouns and verbs. Entity Framework has a certain way of mapping entities into the database, and that’s just how it works. Domain Driven Design (DDD) is about mapping business domain concepts into software artifacts. collaboration between technical and domain experts. That would probably work well. Figure 5. In the end, do what makes sense and keep the code simple and maintainable. When you turn a primitive into a value object the main line of reasoning is that it will allow you to encapsulate behavior in its own object thus better modeling the domain. I’ll have to take a look at that MS article. To start off, let’s recap the basic definition of DDD Aggregate. Over the past decade, CQRS has become more popular and implementing it with Entity Framework Core ma... That is, it’s dead if you are using Entity Framework Core. There are instances where this is true, but not when you aren’t doing something that warrants it. That means that any business rules regarding data consistency must be met and the persistence store should hold that consistent state, leaving the Aggregate correct and ready to use by the next use case. A Discussion on Domain Driven Design: Entities 15 April, 2007. The state object has a simple string-based identity: The ProductKey is actually encoded with two properties, the TenantId as a string and the ProductId as a string, with the two separated by a ‘:’ character. We let Entity Framework to do what it knows how to do by default to map entities to and from the database. However, the ProductState also holds another collection of entities; that is, the List of ProductBacklogItemState: This is all well and good because we keep the database mappings really simple. If you’ve worked with Entity Framework Core you might be wondering how you can map to a complex type that isn’t an entity and has no DbSet in the context. Lets pretend for a moment that we have an Employee class and this employee has an address. To do so we are going to use just a few basic mapping techniques. DDD connects the implementation to an evolving model. A person will have a name, email address and password as well as many other attributes. In this post, I’d like to talk about differences between Entity vs Value Object in more detail. What I am recommending is that you allow Entity Framework to take control of doing what it does best and we just stay out of its way. Figure 6. Designing Aggregates in this way is a big mistake if you expect them (1) to be used by many thousands of users, (2) to perform well, and (3) to scale to the demands of the Internet. Of course, there’s a bit more involved when you consider the overall architecture, but the foregoing points out the high-level composition guidance of Aggregate design. As he does so, he puts strong emphasis on embracing simplicity whenever possible. This is the basic distinction between an Entity and a Value Object. Let’s call it Product: The point of the concrete class Product is to implement the business interface declared by IProduct and to also provide the accessors that are needed by Entity Framework to map the object into and out of the database. This clearly sets it apart from Entity Objects, which are object representations of only the data stored in a database (relational or not), while the behavioris located in separate classes instead. D’oh, your comment widget stripped out the generic specification on Lazy in my original comment. You’ll see in my code up there I purposely left it as a primitive. If the primitive property is acting primarily as a data transfer object, don’t turn it into a value object. I would discourage this as it makes using Identity classes and value objects … For those who aren’t familiar, there is a concept in Domain Driven Design that distinguishes between objects with identity (entities) and those without (value objects). Value objects provide a wealth of benefits though when applied appropriately. Going with the value object approach will allow us to both encapsulate behavior and properties within an object as well as prevent the address from having identity. Still, the question arises, if BacklogItem and Product have some data dependencies, how do we update both of them. Just allow Entity Framework to map entities and get back to what will make a difference in this competitive world: your market-distinguishing application. The whole point of these examples is to stay as far out of Entity Framework’s way as possible. Being able to break apart the configuration for value objects would have been nice, but I was unable to find a way to do so. We are going to implement the Product Aggregate using two approaches. The compiler can help you spot mistakes. It would be very unlikely that we would ever create two or more implementations of IProduct or any of the other interfaces. Still, we can get quite a bit of mileage out of Entity Framework in the midst of DDD and be quite happy with the way it all works out. A poorly designed Aggregate that is not conceived on according to true business consistency constraints. Figure 1. They are not persisted on their own; they belong to an entity. The problem that many have with designing Aggregates is that they don’t consider the true business constraints that require data to be transactionally consistent and instead design Aggregates in large clusters as shown in Figure 2. I am going to suggest that you allow the Entity Framework development team to be the gurus, and you just focus on your specific application. We make the implementation match up to really basic Entity Framework mappings. Actually the article received much more praise than criticism, but… I want to just point out that I am purposely not attempting to win any guru award in Entity Framework mapping. They have no identity. Thanks for pointing this out. In the world of DDD, there’s a well-known guideline that you should prefer Value Objects over Entities where possible. Therefore, when the object is constructed, you must provide the required values, but you must not allow them to change during the object's lifetime. If we go with the address as an entity approach, we’ve given identity to an object that shouldn’t have it and we’ve forced an unneeded extra join. All of the identity types, including ProductOwnerId, are Value Objects and are flattened and mapped into the same database row that ProductState occupies: The [ComplexType] attribute marks the Value Object as a complex type, which is different from an entity. One approach uses a Separated Interface with an implementation class, and the other uses a domain object backed by a state object. There are two main characteristics for value objects: 1. In the references table at the end of this section you can see links to more advanced implementations based on the patterns we have discussed previously. このうち、 モデルを「オブジェクト(値と振る舞いを持つモノ)」として表現する のがEntityとValue Objectの2つになります。 So if the collection of objects contained by the Value Object changes, then by definition, so to does the Value Object (because it would now reference a new immutable collection of objects), requiring a new Value Object, and thus a new hash code computation. DDD Value Objects With Entity Framework Core December 27, 2018 by Sean Leitzinger in .NET Core , C# , Domain Driven Design , Entity Framework Core , Patterns For those who aren’t familiar, there is a concept in Domain Driven Design that distinguishes between objects with identity (entities) and those without (value objects). They form the basis for which we describe the business and interact with it, and often times, entities are the only objects developers create when modeling the system. For example, I would not turn a DateOfBirth into a value object if all I am doing is calling simple methods on the DateTime struct. Record types will finally be available in C# 9: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/whats-new/csharp-9#record-types, Your email address will not be published. These follow the rules of Aggregate, including designing small Aggregates. Checking equality between value objects now becomes a simple != or == due to the absence of a unique Id. That should’ve read Lazy. And when the client requests just one ProductBacklogItem, we convert to one from a single ProductBacklogItemState with the matching identity. Also from the Domain-Driven Design with TypeScript article series.. For example, consider a Person concept. 11. Clients directly use only IProduct. With DDD we. Here is the Employee entity and its configuration: The OwnsOne indicates that the value object is part of the entity. I consider entities to be a common form of reference object, but use the term "entity" only within domain models while the reference/value object dichotomy is useful for all code. When using Domain-Driven Design the most important and overarching principle is the adhere to the Ubiquitous Language, and from the get-go this approach is driving us away from business terminology rather than toward it. Note that this divide is not really a layering, it’s just procedures working with pure data structures. It was a Sunday. Here’s a possible surprise for you. We define a domain concept as an Entity when we care about it’s individuality, when it is important to distinguish it from all other objects in the system. DDD Including DB Id in domain entity. Does the answer matter? We champion simplicity, which requires special discipline and determination. The domain object that models the Aggregate behavior is backed by a state object that holds the model’s state. Therefore, internally the ProductKey must be set to a composite of TenantId as a string and ProductId as a string: I think you get the idea. Finally, DDD doesn't really have anything to say about your key structure, other than it should uniquely identify each entity. Domain-driven design is the concept that the structure and language of software code should match the business domain. And make the PO entity … For example, if a software processes loan applications, it might have classes such as LoanApplication and Customer, and methods such as AcceptOffer and Withdraw. I know, the topic isn’t new and there are a lot of articles on the Internet discussing it already. go to the trouble of modeling your domain as a set of classes but those classes contain no business logic Required fields are marked *. I think when you consider the DbContext for this solution you will conclude that we have a really simple approach: Creating and using a ProductRepository is easy as well: Taking this approach will help us to stay focused on what really counts the most, our Core Domain and its Ubiquitous Language. Requests, Are you a technical person? First and foremost the Aggregate pattern is about transactional consistency. This article introduces the DDD entity style by comparing the standard, non-DDD approach, against a basic DDD-styled entity class. A DDD aggregate is a cluster of domain objects that can be treated as a single unit. Which one you choose is a matter of preference, and you can of course write your own, but I went with the implementation found in this blog post by Vladimir Khorikov: The only thing I changed is to use the new HashCode struct Combine method to create the hash which simplifies the original hash calculation. If we go with the primitive approach, we lose the ability to reuse an address object with its properties and behaviors. Are Domain Objects in Domain Driven Design only supposed to be write-only? In DDD modeling, I try to key in on terms coming out of our Ubiquitous Language that exhibit a thread of identity. We could accomplish this simply by naming the interfaces Product, BacklogItem, Release, and Sprint, but that would mean we would have to come up with sensible names for the implementation classes. The DDD approach to writing entity classes in EF Core makes every property read-only. We purposely try to keep our special mappings, as with ProductKey, to a minimum. 1: In Domain-Driven Design the Evans Classification contrasts value objects with entities. Copyright © 2020 Kalele Inc. All Rights Reserved. The ProductBacklogItemState is an internal implementation details—just a data holder. Aggregate is a pattern in Domain-Driven Design. Figure 3. Bob Smith from Cheyenne, Wyoming and Bob Smith from Tallahassee, Florida might not agree. 13. Within our database this person is represented by an id. Thus, the client facing names should be Product, BacklogItem, and the like. Here are some thoughts on distinctions between aggregates and entities in domain-driven design (DDD), in response to some good questions Harry Brumleve asked me via email. This points to the another rule of Aggregate design, to use eventual consistency as shown in Figure 4. Your “helper” for adding days or calculating a specific date will be unlikely to be simpler than me just calling the built in methods. Figure 6. The ReferenceOwnershipBuilder that Entity Framework Core uses to map value objects has constructors that are for internal use only. Figure 5 shows you the basic intention of this approach. And then I learned that one more task — beyond everything else on my plate — must be accomplished. Some well-designed Aggregates that adhere to true consistency rules. We are committed to balancing the right technology choices with your essential and unique business vision. In Domain-Driven Design, such “identity-less” objects are known as “Value Objects” and contrasted with “Entities”, which have a “lifetime” (for example, a student is an entity, but a grade is a value object). Related posts DDD Europe Conference Report - part II Objects should be constructed in one go Inject the ManagerRegistry instead of the EntityManager Relying on the database to validate your data Experimenting with Broadway. Contrary to some hardcore adherents of the primitive obsession code smell, there are times when turning a primitive into a value object is not necessarily a good idea. Nope, just the opposite in fact. All the code for this post can be found here: https://github.com/SeanLeitzinger/Entity-Framework-Core-Examples. You can have simple objects in your Domain and you can have objects which have a business meaning. More on that later (in this blog). We aggressively advance software developer skills utilizing DDD and the VLINGO/PLATFORM to deliver excellent software solutions. Immutability is an important requirement. As shown in Figure 6, the domain object defines and implements the domain-driven model using the Ubiquitous Language, and the state objects hold the state of the Aggregate. So, we have four prominent Aggregates in our Scrum project management application: Product, BacklogItem, Release, and Sprint. Lets start off by taking a look at our database context and configuration. Check it out if you liked this post. Two important building blocks when we talk about code are entities and value objects. At the end of a committed database transaction, a single Aggregate should be completely up to date. Entity. Note the ProductKey property. An entity: has an identity For the first example I create a Separated Interface that is implemented by a concrete domain object. Entities. There are many different implementations of this base class and the main difference is how the underlying equality comparison is implemented. Unfortunately it looks like C# 8.0 will not be shipping with it. There are several draw backs to both approaches. Including the TenantId in the ProductKey ensures that all data stored in the database is segregated by tenant. This article shows you how to build a DDD-styled entity class and then compares/contrasts the DDD version with the standard version. For example, in Bullsfirst, a BrokerageAccount is an entity with accountId as its unique identifier. Whether or not something is an Entity can depend largely on the context of the problem domain. Observe the following example of a value object: The empty constructor is necessary to work with Entity Framework Core migrations. Domain-Driven Design: Monoliths to Microservices, Domain-Driven Design for Modern Architectures. Therefore in my practice, Onion architecture is the best among others to be coupled with DDD design and to integrate DDD principles in the real-life projects. I am not going to recommend that you need to become an Entity Framework guru. We let Entity Framework to do what it knows how to do by default to map entities to and from the database. The week began as busy as ever. So in the case of address we would end up with columns named Address_City, Address_State, and so forth. My last post was intended to help better explain how the ubiquitous language forms the back bone of Domain Driven Design (DDD). Even for Value Objects containing collections, those collections ought to be immutable. I see a lot of examples given of a DateOfBirth property being its own class. Since my example code is working with a test project only, and not an ASP.NET web application, I’m just setting my connection string manually in the context. The first characteristic was already discussed. focus on the core domain and domain logic. So treat PO as an aggregate of the PO entiity and the Line Item value objects. In real life DDD it's the opposite. You’ll notice that I am using a ValueObject base class that all value objects inherit from. Let’s just pause there and move on to the second and related issue. I believe most are curious and. Context Map: Inline value objects fields in the entity table, a simple design that also supports refactoring of value objects from an entity. PHP Domain-Driven Design value objects entity identity Doctrine ORM. Just to close the loop on this, I see that MS has some documentation about DDD and CQRS, and instead of using Lazy (which admittedly, now that I see what they’re doing is a bit overkill), they use a Nullable. Our database context: You’ll notice there are no DbSets or configuration for the value objects. Modeling business concepts with objects may seem very intuitive at first sight but there are a lot of difficulties awaiting us in the details. Trying to compare two addresses as entities now becomes more difficult due to the existence of an Id that will always be unique. Key structure is an implementation detail, not a DDD design choice. All that said, if you really want to use composites and you can get your team to agree, then by all means, make the choice and go for it. If I have two Person objects, with the same Name, are they same Person? Figure 4. To define domain-driven design we should first establish what we mean by domain in this context (and in development in general). I consider myself a refugee from the old JEE architectures. After all, your Core Domain is where you want to put your creative energies, not in becoming an expert in Entity Framework. Thi… This means that the person could change their name, email and password but it would still be the same person. We could also choose to design the state object to redundantly hold whole identities separate of the ProductKey: This could be well worth the slight memory overhead if converting to identities had a heavy performance footprint. Yet, how do we get a ProductBacklogItemState object, or the entire List collection for that matter, into a format that we can allow clients to consume? A better example would demonstrate the need to ensure that either the internal state did not change, or that all the mutations for a method occurred. Value objects allow you to perform certain tricks for performance, thanks to their immutable nature. Now with this brief refresher on the basics of Aggregate design, let’s see how we might map the Product to a database using Entity Framework. We need to persist the state of these four small Aggregates and we want to use Entity Framework to do so. Once computed and stored, they reference that value from that point forward, which is exactly what I was trying to achieve. There is really no good reason to create a Separated Interface. An example may be an order and its line-items, these will be separate objects, but it's useful to treat the order (together with its line items) as a single aggregate. Let me be clear about one thing concerning Domain objects: they aren't either Entities or Value Objects (VO). There are several characteristics that value objects have: The creation of a value object is done through the constructor, and once created, its property values can’t be changed. Business and development teams should communicate with each other using DDD tactical patterns like Domain Event, Domain Service, Entity, Value Object. It is pretty typical when programming with C# and .NET to name your interfaces with an “I” prefix, so we will use IProduct: With this interface we can create a concrete implementation class. The second approach uses a domain object backed by state objects. This helps keep the DbContext very simple by registering the implementation classes: Rather than fully fleshing out the details of this approach, there is enough detail already to make some judgments. For everyone who has read my book and/or Effective Aggregate Design, but have been left wondering how to implement Aggregates with Domain-Driven Design (DDD) on the .NET platform using C# and Entity Framework, this post is for you. As soon as you try to step outside the basics and go to some extremes of esoteric mapping techniques in ways that Entity Framework was not meant to be used, you are going to experience a lot of pain.