Entity-framework – EF 4: Removing child object from collection does not delete it – why

It sounds like you're basically trying to decouple EF from the database. Unfortunately save changes pushes the changes back to the database which obviously you don't want. You can just not call SaveChanges and continue to work with the collection. EF will account for your deletion and not return that information. At the end you can discard your changes and move on.

If you do actually want to delete the item without deleting the child you can't in the current schema. You would have to allow nulls in the DB.

You should delete old child items thisParent.ChildItems one by one manually. Entity Framework doesn't do that for you. It finally cannot decide what you want to do with the old child items - if you want to throw them away or if you want to keep and assign them to other parent entities. You must tell Entity Framework your decision. But one of these two decisions you HAVE to make since the child entities cannot live alone without a reference to any parent in the database (due to the foreign key constraint). That's basically what the exception says.

Edit

What I would do if child items could be added, updated and deleted:

public void UpdateEntity(ParentItem parent)
{
    // Load original parent including the child item collection
    var originalParent = _dbContext.ParentItems
        .Where(p => p.ID == parent.ID)
        .Include(p => p.ChildItems)
        .SingleOrDefault();
    // We assume that the parent is still in the DB and don't check for null

    // Update scalar properties of parent,
    // can be omitted if we don't expect changes of the scalar properties
    var parentEntry = _dbContext.Entry(originalParent);
    parentEntry.CurrentValues.SetValues(parent);

    foreach (var childItem in parent.ChildItems)
    {
        var originalChildItem = originalParent.ChildItems
            .Where(c => c.ID == childItem.ID && c.ID != 0)
            .SingleOrDefault();
        // Is original child item with same ID in DB?
        if (originalChildItem != null)
        {
            // Yes -> Update scalar properties of child item
            var childEntry = _dbContext.Entry(originalChildItem);
            childEntry.CurrentValues.SetValues(childItem);
        }
        else
        {
            // No -> It's a new child item -> Insert
            childItem.ID = 0;
            originalParent.ChildItems.Add(childItem);
        }
    }

    // Don't consider the child items we have just added above.
    // (We need to make a copy of the list by using .ToList() because
    // _dbContext.ChildItems.Remove in this loop does not only delete
    // from the context but also from the child collection. Without making
    // the copy we would modify the collection we are just interating
    // through - which is forbidden and would lead to an exception.)
    foreach (var originalChildItem in
                 originalParent.ChildItems.Where(c => c.ID != 0).ToList())
    {
        // Are there child items in the DB which are NOT in the
        // new child item collection anymore?
        if (!parent.ChildItems.Any(c => c.ID == originalChildItem.ID))
            // Yes -> It's a deleted child item -> Delete
            _dbContext.ChildItems.Remove(originalChildItem);
    }

    _dbContext.SaveChanges();
}

Note: This is not tested. It's assuming that the child item collection is of type ICollection. (I usually have IList and then the code looks a bit different.) I've also stripped away all repository abstractions to keep it simple.

I don't know if that is a good solution, but I believe that some kind of hard work along these lines must be done to take care of all kinds of changes in the navigation collection. I would also be happy to see an easier way of doing it.