Linq To SQL Without Explicit Foreign Key Relations

Question

I am working with a few legacy tables that have relationships, but those relationships haven't been explicitly set as primary/foreign keys. I created a .dbml file using "Linq To Sql Classes" and established the proper Case.CaseID = CaseInfo.CaseID association. My resulting class is CasesDataContext.

My Tables (One to many):

Case
------------------
CaseID (int not null)
MetaColumn1 (varchar)
MetaColumn2 (varchar)
MetaColumn3 (varchar)
...


CaseInfo
------------------
CaseInfoID (int)
CaseID (int nulls allowed)
CaseInfoMeta (varchar)
...

I'm new to LinqToSQL and am having trouble doing..

CasesDataContext db = new CasesDataContext();
var Cases = from c in db.Cases
            where c.CaseInfo.CaseInfoMeta == "some value"
            select c;

(Edit) My problem being that CaseInfo or CaseInfos is not available as a member of Cases.

I heard from a colleague that I might try ADO.Net Entity Data Model to create my Data Context class, but haven't tried that yet and wanted to see if I'd be wasting my time or should I go another route. Any tips, links, help would be most appreciated.

Answer 1

Is the association set to One to One or One to Many? If you have the association set to One to Many, then what you have is an EntitySet, not an EntityRef and you'll need to use a where clause on the dependent set to get the correct value. I suspect that you want a One to One relationship, which is not the default. Try changing it to One to One and see if you can construct the query.

Note: I'm just guessing because you haven't actually told us what the "trouble" actually is.