Can Entity Framework handle many to many relationship without an intersection object?
c#, ef-database-first, entity-framework, entity-framework-5
Solution
According to this tutorial, you'll get the desired behaviour if your `StudentCourse` table only contains the foreign-key columns. If it contains any other columns, EF will generate an intermediate entity to represent the join.
In this case, dropping the surrogate key from the `StudentCourse` table and replacing it with a composite primary key should work.
Problem
Using database first model: Let's say we have the classic tables `Student`, `Course` and `StudentCourse` (the latter obviously having FKs to `Student` and `Course`). If you import this model to EF, you will get an object generated for each of them. The `Student` and `Course` classes will each have a collection of `StudentCourses`, from which you need to jump another relationship to get to the `Course` or `Student`, respectively. I would like to have the code generated in such a way that the underlying intersection table is invisible, i.e. `Student` has a collection of `Courses`, and `Course` has a collection of `Students`. I have seen this done in other ORM software (specifically, TopLink). Can it be done in EF?