Add table with references to existing entities

Dear all,

I am currently developping a plugin and i would like to extend the product entity and adding a relationship with a new table.

Let's imagine that i want to add a new relationship between Product table and a new entity named ProductRentalPeriod for example.

What is the best way to implement this relationship ?

- Solution 1: Update and add directly my new table and relationship in Nop.Core. In that case, it seems that I can use Entity Framework to create relationship. However, it forces me to modify Nop.Core and I would like to avoid it.

- Solution 2: Add my entity in my plugin and using a new db context in my plugin. I prefer this solution because i can put all of my code outside of Nop.Core project.
However it seems that in that case, I cannot add relationship between the Product entity and the new entity named ProductRentalPeriod.

What do you advise ? What are the pros and cons ?

Thanks a lot

Hi vans63,

2nd solution is best for you

In the 1st solution you have to customize the nopcommerce code , so it can be wide changes and effect to others.
and in 2nd solution

you can create a table for mapping product Id into your custom table and by that ID you can access all default functionality of product , so by this you can get your solution

Thanks

Ok thanks a lot for the information !

Hello,

Did anyone find a solution for the second option? I am exactly in the same situation.

If you do not want to touch the core of Nop and only extending the functionality from your plugin, which I also had experienced early, you need to manually control the relationship between your entities and Nop entities, which actually is a better idea but will take a lot of time to do that.

For example, in my case, I want to reference the product from my entity. I store the Nop product Id within my entity. When doing CRUD operations within my entity, I check to make sure the Id is correct and already existed. When doing work on Nop Product entity, I hook into their entity event life-cycles and either remove my entity or update it. Basically you would have to handle by yourself and not let the db handle the relations.

Also a note: Since the plugin db context is a different context than the nop db context, you won't be able to to join from two different contexts. What I had done so far is to project the result into a List and use List query to filter the result. It will affect the performance but that is the only way to do join in two different db contexts.