Improvements to reverse engineering (a.k.a. scaffolding a DbContext) for Database First flows

[ajcvickers]

This is a grouping of related issues. Feel free to vote (👍) for this issue to indicate that this is an area that you think we should spend time on, but consider also voting for individual issues for things you consider especially important.

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This an "epic" issue for the theme of miscellaneous improvements to reverse engineering (scaffolding) a context from an existing databases/. Specific pieces of work will be tracked by linked issues.

Done in 6.0

• Detect simple join tables in reverse engineering and create many-to-many relationships #22475
• Preserve DeleteBehavior when scaffolding a database created by EF Core #21252
• Can Scaffold-DbContext generate entities with comments #19113
• Scaffolding and C# 8 nullable reference types #15520
• Unblocking duplicate foreign keys when reverse engineering an existing database (SQL Server) #25197

Done in 7.0

• dotnet ef dbcontext scaffold doesn't work with computed columns unless user is db_owner #22842
• Code templates for scaffolding entity types and DbContext from an existing database #4038
• Scaffold-DbContext template not compatible with DbContext pooling (AddDbContextPool) #12604
• Stop scaffolding DbSet initialization to null! #26877
• RevEng: Enable generating IEntityTypeConfiguration classes (avoids large OnModelCreating) #8434
• RevEng: Avoid redundant code in many to many #25547

Done in 8.0

• SQLite RevEng: Sample data to determine CLR type #8824

Backlog

• Reverse Engineer: Better support for namespaces #3988
• Generate custom namespaces for literals in scaffolding #25493
• Allow CoreTypeMapping.GenerateCodeLiteral to influence using directives #13799
• T4 template for scaffolding data-binding entity types using INotifyPropertyChanged etc. #15515
• Add option to skip views to Scaffold-dbcontext #21283
• Update model from database #831
• Support scaffolding models and context to separate projects (for update from database) #7847
• RevEng: Option to ignore DEFAULT constraints #10881
• Consider allowing reverse engineering to generate CLR property defaults based on column defaults #9632
• Reverse engineering: Have a way to discover installed providers so you don't always need to specify them in commands #13940
• Reverse engineer/scaffold stored procedures  #15105
• RevEng: Check constraint #15408
• Scaffold views into SQL definitions on the model #20940
• DatabaseGeneratedAttribute in scaffolded code #22170
• Consider using Verbatim String Generation if absolutely sure will not contain linebreaks #20723
• RevEng: Generate Validation attribute always #9580
• Recognize filters created by fluent API and reverse engineer to fluent API. #10183
• Scaffold-DbContext generates incorrect nav property on foreign key with filtered unique index #11298
• Reverse Engineer: Table/Schema Exclusion #6182
• T4 template to exclude from the generated code database artifacts not used by EF Core at runtime #10890
• Allow omitting value generation via convention when scaffolding #11005
• Optionally bring back join tables on scaffold db in EF Core 6 #26820
• Names and default names for keys, constraints and indices #12837
• Revisit navigation naming convention when reverse-engineering composite keys #16711
• RevEng: Use alternate key when no primary key #19918
• SQLite RevEng: Reverse engineer index filters #8800
• Sqlite RevEng: Scaffold CHECK constraints #23142
• SQLite RevEng: Reverse engineer constraint names #8802
• Sqlite Spatial RevEng: Column SRID and Dimension not configured #13765
• Sqlite Spatial RevEng: Ignore empty string column default #13766
• SQL Server RevEng: Configure SqlServerDbContextOptionsBuilder #10487
• Reverse engineering rowversion/timestamp on SQL Server should generate ulong property #12435
• SqlServer RevEng: Scaffold default schema #9318
• SqlServer RevEng: Scaffold Included index columns #22150
• RevEng: allow to reverse-engineer indexes on period columns #26008
• RevEng: Decimal column with same precision and scale as the default produce warnings at runtime #12241

[w3rm]

I will be very happy with this one -> Revisit navigation naming convention when reverse-engineering composite keys #16711

[AraHaan]

I will be happy with this one -> SP's being scaffolded even if it requires them being done at the template level.

However if I was to implement it myself, how could the parameters, it's name, etc be known by the template system, or even it's implementation?

I guess this is something that merits a source dive into ef6 to find out.