EF Core Naming Conventions Getting Started

Naming Convention

Entity Framework Core generates the database schema from the model when you use migration or call the context.Database.EnsureCreated().

• The name of generated objects has to be inferred from the name of the classes and properties.
• The default names should be ok for a lot of people, but sometimes you need to use a specific naming convention.
• For example, some developer wants the table name to be upper case or column names to be prefixed by the table name, etc.

EFCore.NamingConventions is a NuGet library for Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore provides naming conventions for Entity Framework Core tables and columns.

Supported Naming Conventions

EFCore.NamingConventions supports the following naming conventions.

• UseSnakeCaseNamingConvention: FullName becomes full_name
• UseLowerCaseNamingConvention: FullName becomes fullname
• UseCamelCaseNamingConvention: FullName becomes fullName
• UseUpperCaseNamingConvention: FullName becomes FULLNAME

Installation

You can easily install it from the Package Manager Console window by running the following command.

PM> Install-Package EFCore.NamingConventions

Environment Setup

To start using the EFCore.NamingConventions in your application, you will need to install the EFCore.NamingConventions NuGet package.

Let's open the Visual Studio and create a new project.

Select the Create a new project option.

Choose C# as language, Windows as a platform, and Console as the project type. In the template pane, select Console Application and click the Next button.

Enter the project name, you can change the location and solution name, but we will leave it and click on the Next button.

On the Additional Information dialog, select the target framework and then click on the Create button.

You can see a new console application project is created. Now to install an EFCore.NamingConventions, right-click on the project in Solution Explorer, and select Manage NuGet Packages...

Select the Browse tab and search for EFCore.NamingConventions and install the latest version by pressing the Install button.

Once EFCore.NamingConventions has been successfully installed. Let's add the database provider that you want to target. We will use SQL Server, and the provider package is Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.SqlServer. We can easily install that NuGet package by executing the following command in Package Manager Console.

PM> Install-Package Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.SqlServer

You are now ready to start your application.