Data Insertion in Entity Framework

In Entity Framework, data insertion is one of the basic and most common CRUD operations that we will perform in an application.

Inserting data involves adding new entities to the database. For this, in Entity Framework, we mainly have two methods: Add and AddRange.

When you insert an entity into the DbContext, it will be added with the Added state, but no actions will be taken in the database yet.

When you want to perform the data in the database, we execute SaveChanges. Then, the corresponding SQL statement (INSERT) will be generated and persisted in the database.

Simple Insertion with Add

The Add method is the most basic way to insert an entity into the database. This method adds a single entity to the EF context,

dbContext.Entity.Add(entity);

Suppose we have a Product entity that represents a table in the database:

public class Product
{
    public int Id { get; set; }
    public string Name { get; set; }
    public decimal Price { get; set; }
}

To insert a new product, we would do the following:

using (var context = new MyDbContext())
{
    var newProduct = new Product
    {
        Name = "Laptop",
        Price = 1200.00m
    };

    context.Products.Add(newProduct); // We add the product to the context
    context.SaveChanges(); // We persist the changes to the database
}

Multiple Insertion with AddRange

The AddRange method is an extension of Add that allows you to insert multiple entities in a single operation.

This is useful when you need to add a large number of records, as it reduces the number of calls to the database and improves performance.

dbContext.Entity.AddRange(entities);

Continuing with the Product example, suppose we want to insert several products at once:

using (var context = new MyDbContext())
{
    var products = new List<Product>
    {
        new Product { Name = "Keyboard", Price = 50.00m },
        new Product { Name = "Mouse", Price = 25.00m },
        new Product { Name = "Monitor", Price = 300.00m }
    };

    context.Products.AddRange(products); // We add the list of products
    context.SaveChanges(); // We persist the changes to the database
}