ASP.NET MVC: Where does a DBContext class go?

Question

Im working on an MVC 5 project in ASP.NET and have just setup a local DB but im not to sure where the DB context class would fit in with the MVC structure

Answer 1

Typically I'd separate that out into a separate Whatever.Data project/layer, so that the solution structure would look something like:

The advantage of doing it this way, is that it lets you group together topics that only concern the Data layer. A typical data layer project might look like:

Going a little beyond what you had asked, I personally use the DbContext mainly in a repository, and I inject the repository into the controller with dependency injection.

Each repository method is a special-purpose domain behavior / business rule.

On the other hand, if you're exposing OData, then the ApiController does need the DbContext & Entity Framework et al.