.net – Entity Framework 4 mapping fragment error when adding new entity scalar

LINQ to SQL only supports 1 to 1 mapping of database tables, views, sprocs and functions available in Microsoft SQL Server. It's a great API to use for quick data access construction to relatively well designed SQL Server databases. LINQ2SQL was first released with C# 3.0 and .Net Framework 3.5.

LINQ to Entities (ADO.Net Entity Framework) is an ORM (Object Relational Mapper) API which allows for a broad definition of object domain models and their relationships to many different ADO.Net data providers. As such, you can mix and match a number of different database vendors, application servers or protocols to design an aggregated mash-up of objects which are constructed from a variety of tables, sources, services, etc. ADO.Net Framework was released with the .Net Framework 3.5 SP1.

This is a good introductory article on MSDN: Introducing LINQ to Relational Data

This is because of the way EF4 works with model-first.

When you first create a model-first model, it's in a state that the SSDL does not exist. You can drag entities, associate them and so forth and yet, if you take a look at the SSDL on the EDMX file, you will see that none of the entities have an associated storage table in the SSDL.

That changes when you click the Generate Database From Model context menu item. The confusing part is that this action does more than simply generating a DDL script. In fact, it changes the EDMX file to include SSDL information. From this point on, the EDMX file will enter a state in which every entity in the designer/CSDL must map to an entity in the SSDL. If one does not map, it will trigger a compile time error:

No mapping specified for the following EntitySet/AssociationSet - (EntityName)

Another interesting fact is that it's not the kind of error that will prevent compilation. It will, indeed, generate the output class library. Shouldn't it be a warning or something?

To prevent this error, All you have to do after inserting a new entity is to Generate Database From Model again. That will update the SSDL and fix the mappings.

EDIT

If you are not using model-first and you "update from database", you will also have this error in the case you deleted a table in DB Server. This is because Entity Framework will not automatically delete the entity for you. Delete the entity manually and the error will go away.