Creating an AssociationSetMapping for MySQL with the Entity Framework Designer?

Question

I am trying to build an Entity Framework model for my database schema using EF4 and Visual Studio 2010. Since I am stuck using MySQL as our database (for now), I pretty quickly discovered that since MYISAM tables don't support foreign key constraints, the designer does not have any way to automatically create all the associations for you. It is easy enough to go through the model and build them all manually, but I ran into a problem trying to map a pure join table.

Normally if you are using SQL Server or some other database that supports Foreign Keys, the designer will create all the mappings for you and in the case of pure join tables will create an AssociationSetMapping such that the join table is entirely hidden in the model. Instead you end up with a Many to Many mapping between two two primary entities.

However I am at a loss as to how to create this kind of mapping manually? If I create a Many to Many association between my two entities, I end up with a regular Association, not an AssociationSetMapping. There does not appear to be a way to create one of these in the designer than I can figure out, and to tell it which join table is supposed to be used at the database level.

Am I missing something, and there is a way to do this?

If not, I suppose I have to hack the XML directly, but at this point it is not clear what I need to add to the XML files and where, in order to manually create the association set mapping?

Answer 1

Ok, I can answer this one myself. Once you create a many to many association with the designer, you DON'T set a referential constraint on it, but rather use the Mapping Details window to tell the association what table is the join table, and which keys map to which fields in the database. Simple enough once I figured it out :) But I could not find any good documentation on this.