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I've got an entity which is identified by no own id but an unique combination of properties, each of which is a foreign key.

But Entity Framework designer does not seem to allow to make a foreign key (a "navigation property") a part of a primary key. Am I misunderstanding something or is it just unsupported?

Example:

enter image description here

here an instrument is designated by a very short symbolic identifier (name), which doesn't seem to be wise to be replaced by a numeric code.

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  • is it .net 3.5 or 4.0? What did you get in the designer? Commented May 30, 2011 at 23:15
  • @ladislav-mrnka, .Net 4.0, VS 2010, there is just no "entity key" property available for "navigation properties". Commented May 30, 2011 at 23:48
  • I don't know about EF designer. In traditional ER design with paper and pencil, entities don't have foreign keys as part of their PK. Subentities and relationships do. Is value a subentity of instrument? Commented May 31, 2011 at 10:43

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Navigation properties cannot be part of primary key. Composite primary key (entity key) can consists only from scalar properties -> only foreign properties related to these navigation properties can be part of FK - here is the example of the model which uses such relation.

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