Entity Framework deletion of non-null foreign keyed rows

Question

I have a schema similar to the standard Product / OrderDetails / Order setup. I want to delete a single Product and cascade delete all OrderDetails which reference that product.

Assuming that I've thought this through from the business rules perspective, what's the most elegant way to handle that with Entity Framework 4?

Answer 1

First thing is first:

Is there any reason on delete cascade at the database level won't work?

If that's really not a possibility, you could try the following:

Since ObjectContext doesn't have a DeleteAll style method...you could always implement your own:

public static void DeleteAll(this ObjectContext context, 
    IEnumerable<Object> records)
{
    foreach(Object record in records)
    {
        context.DeleteObject(record);
    }
}

Then you could write something like (probably in a Repository):

context.DeleteAll(context.OrderDetails.Where(od => od.Product == product));

Or, to be a little cleaner:

var toDelete = context.OrderDetails.Where(od => od.Product == product);

context.DeleteAll(toDelete);