Can an Entity Be Associated By More Than 1 Entity?

Question

So let's assume I have the following entities and their context configuration set up as follows. I have omitted a lot of properties for brevity's sake:

public class Company {
    public int Id { get; set; }
    public Location Location { get; set; }
}

public class Customer {
    public int Id { get; set; }
    public Location Location { get; set; }
}

public class Location {
    public int Id { get; set; }
}

public sealed class EntityDefaultContext : DbContext {
    protected override void OnModelCreating(DbModelBuilder modelBuilder) {
        modelBuilder.Entity<Company>().HasKey(m => m.Id).ToTable("Company");
        modelBuilder.Entity<Company>().Property(m => m.Id).HasColumnName("Id");
        modelBuilder.Entity<Company>().HasRequired(m => m.Location).WithRequiredDependent().Map(m => m.MapKey("LocationId"));

        modelBuilder.Entity<Customer>().HasKey(m => m.Id).ToTable("Customer");
        modelBuilder.Entity<Customer>().Property(m => m.Id).HasColumnName("Id");
        modelBuilder.Entity<Customer>().HasRequired(m => m.Location).WithRequiredDependent().Map(m => m.MapKey("LocationId"));

        modelBuilder.Entity<Location>().HasKey(m => m.Id).ToTable("Location");
        modelBuilder.Entity<Location>().Property(m => m.Id).HasColumnName("Id");
    }
}

So as you can see, both the Company and Customer entities hold a reference to the Location entity. Something that would normally be expected I believe.

I set up my DB context for just that as you can also see. But the SQL that EF generates is terribly inefficient:

SELECT 
    [Extent1].[Id] AS [Id], 
    [Extent1].[LocationId] AS [LocationId], 
    [Extent3].[Id] AS [Id1]
FROM
    [dbo].[Customer] AS [Extent1]
LEFT OUTER JOIN [dbo].[Company] AS [Extent2] ON [Extent1].[LocationId] = [Extent2].[LocationId]
LEFT OUTER JOIN [dbo].[Company] AS [Extent3] ON [Extent1].[LocationId] = [Extent3].[LocationId]
LEFT OUTER JOIN [dbo].[Company] AS [Extent4] ON [Extent1].[LocationId] = [Extent4].[LocationId]

This is generated when I do something like this:

var q = from c in defaultContext.Set<Customer>().Include(m => m.Location)
        select c;

I am doing it like this for reasons that are not relevant to the question. The weird thing is that here is the SQL if I only configure the Location entity to be associated by only the Customer entity:

SELECT 
    [Extent1].[Id] AS [Id], 
    [Extent1].[LocationId] AS [LocationId]
FROM
    [dbo].[Customer] AS [Extent1]
INNER JOIN [dbo].[Location] AS [Extent2] ON [Extent1].[LocationId] = [Extent2].[Id]

Which is what I would expect. This makes me think. Does EF not support this scenario? How could it not?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Your original mapping uses one-to-one relation. That always causes some special behavior. Moreover it has some other requirements to work correctly. What you probably want is one-to-many relation between Customer and Location and Company and Location. Change WithRequiredDependent to WithMany and it should work.