There are some use cases that force me to use raw T-SQL instead of using LINQ. One of them is the need for ROW_NUMBER. But not anymore…
One again, due to great work of Entity Framework (EF) team we are able to add more capabilities to EF quite easily. At the moment there are (at least) 2 approaches, the first one is by implementing a custom IMethodCallTranslator the other one is by using the method HasDbFunction.
This blog post is all about the usage of the EF function RowNumber. In the following post we will see how to add a custom function to EF by implementing an IMethodCallTranslator and to register it with EF. The last post of this series will show you the 2nd approach that uses the method HasDbFunction.
Entity Framework Core: ROW_NUMBER Support
- Follow-up post: Making RowNumber (more) useful
- Entity Framework Core: Custom Functions (using IMethodCallTranslator)
- Entity Framework Core: Custom Functions (using HasDbFunction)
The actual code can be found on Azure DevOps: Thinktecture.EntityFrameworkCore
Activate the RowNumber support
To be able to define a RowNumber in a regular LINQ query we have to install the Nuget package Thinktecture.EntityFrameworkCore.SqlServer first. The package will provide a new extension method AddRowNumberSupport for the SqlServerDbContextOptionsBuilder that we have to call during the configuration of a DbContext.
services
.AddDbContext<DemoDbContext>(builder => builder
.UseSqlServer("conn-string", sqlOptions =>
{
sqlOptions.AddRowNumberSupport();
});
Usage of RowNumber in LINQ
There are 2 method overloads for definition of a RowNumber, one with and one without the PARTITION BY part. In both cases we are using the new extension method overload RowNumber for the DbFunctions.
**RowNumber** with the ORDER BY part only:
// ORDER BY ProductId
var query = dbContext.OrderItems
.Select(i => new
{
...,
RowNumber = EF.Functions.RowNumber(i.ProductId)
});
// ORDER BY ProductId, OrderId
var query = dbContext.OrderItems
.Select(i => new
{
...,
RowNumber = EF.Functions.RowNumber(new
{
i.ProductId,
i.OrderId
})
});
Use another new extension method Descending for changing the default sort order (ascending).
In the example below I’m using _ instead of a property name because the names on the left side of = don’t matter.
// ORDER BY ProductId, OrderId DESC
...
.Select(i => new
{
...,
RowNumber = EF.Functions.RowNumber(new
{
i.ProductId,
_ = EF.Functions.Descending(i.OrderId)
})
})
RowNumber with PARTITION BY and ORDER BY:
The second overload of RowNumber has 2 arguments. The first one is for the definition of the PARTITION BY part and the second is for the ORDER BY.
// PARTITION BY ProductId ORDER BY OrderId
...
.Select(i => new
{
...,
RowNumber = EF.Functions.RowNumber(i.ProductId, i.OrderId)
})
// PARTITION BY ProductId, Id ORDER BY OrderId
...
.Select(i => new
{
...,
RowNumber = EF.Functions.RowNumber(new
{
i.ProductId,
i.Id
},
i.OrderId)
})
In the next blog post we will see how to introduce a new EF function by implementing IMethodCallTranslator.
