ASP.NET Core 6.0 Minimal API with Entity framework core

ASP.NET Core 6.0 Minimal API is the new breed of ASP.NET which helps us write API’s in much lesser code, it's something I have already discussed in my earlier post over here.

Goal

The goal of this article is to ensure, we complete all the setup and necessary pre-requisite required to wire up Entity framework within our ASP.NET Core minimal API controllers and ensure the data acess from SQL server DB is in place.

So, in this article we will do the following

1. Install EF Core within our project
2. Create DBContext access class
3. Set Dependency Injection with service container
4. Perform Entity Framework Database update/migrate to SQL server

Install EF Core within our project

To install EF Core within our existing project, lets add the following Nuget packages

<PackageReference Include="Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore" Version="5.0.8" />  
  
<PackageReference Include="Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.Design" Version="5.0.8">      
  
<PackageReference Include="Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.SqlServer" Version="5.0.8" />

Create DBContext access class

DBContext will set the EF context for data access and set the DataSet for our model to access data from data source. We are going to call it as EmployeeDbContext

Here we will create the following

//Constructor with DbContextOptions and the context class itself
public EmployeeDbContext(DbContextOptions<EmployeeDbContext> options) : base(options)        
{        
}
//Create the DataSet for the Employee         
public DbSet<Employee> Employee { get; set; }

Once created, we need to override the OnConfiguring method to read the connection string of database from SQL server via appsettings.json file

Set Dependency Injection with service container

This is done in our Program.cs file

var connectionString = builder.Configuration.GetConnectionString("AppDb");
builder.Services.AddDbContext<EmployeeDbContext>(x => x.UseSqlServer(connectionString));

Finally, Entity Framework Database update via dotnet-ef

Pre-requisite:

Make sure you have already installed the dotnet-ef tool, which can be done something like this

Lets run the command from Powershell/Commandline as to start adding the database and create our first initial tables

To Add Database

dotnet ef database update

To add the migration

dotnet ef migrations add initialDb

The above will create the migration script for us

Complete video demonstration

Here is the complete video of the above article demonstration in action