C#C
C#•3y ago
Anton

❔ Using automapper to update EF Core entities recursively

I'm trying the neat idea to try and make a generic create/update method which supports includes.

The first branch takes care of inserts. It takes requests of this form (currently doesn't check the nested ids, which it should):
{
  "name": "John",
  "projects": [
    {
        "projectName": "A"
    },
    {
        "projectName": "B"
    }
  ]
}

It then maps this dto to a recursively tracked entity.


The second branch works with requests of this form, taking care of updates:
{
  "id": 1,
  "projects": [
    {
        "id": 7,
        "projectName": "Changed"
    },
    {
        // Should not update anything, but try and find the project with this id.
        "id": 8
    },
    {
      "projectName": "Q"
    }
  ]
}

Currently I'm doing a bunch of things that are related to nested entities manually. I'm manually sorting the projects in reverse order, so that the projects with null key (projects to be inserted), end up at the end of the list. I'm then querying the entity from the db, checking if all of the projects meant for updating were found, and then I do a recursive copy of the dto into that entity. This maps all properties of the person and of each nested project. At least it should, what actually happens is it copies the null values over as well (see the mapper profile below). Then the tracker picks up on all of the newly mapped projects.

My question is, why does automapper map null properties even though it's set to ignore them, and is there a way to generalize this thing? The way I came up with doesn't seem overly complex, it's just not fully generic. I want the both the include filtering and the mappings to work independent of the level of depth of the objects.
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