What are the known limitations of ADO.NET entity framework designer?

Question

We just found an issue like, when a foreign key relationship is broken, there is no way to re-establish the link in the designer.

Any other such known limitations of Entity Framework designer?

Answer 1

Among other things,

1. You can't map complex types at all. (Update Fixed in EF v4.)
2. You must map every column of a table in the storage schema.
3. Generalizing (2), you don't get a lot of control over the storage schema at all. What you mostly see is the client schema and the mapping to the storage schema.
4. If you delete a type from the diagram, it's difficult to put it back.

I wrote some thoughts about the difference in philosophical approaches between the Entity Framework itself and the designer in this post.

I think that if you intend to do non-trivial/non-default things in the Entity Framework, you should get used to editing the EDMX. Most other ORMs do require editing XML at some point, for what it's worth.