Undocumented GetMappingStrategy() return value?

[fterrani]

Type of issue

Missing information

Description

Greetings.

At first, I was surprised to see that these two GetMappingStrategy() methods return string?:

• RelationalTypeBaseExtensions.GetMappingStrategy(IReadOnlyTypeBase)
• RelationalEntityTypeExtensions.GetMappingStrategy(IReadOnlyEntityType)

I assumed that's for flexibility but then I found the RelationalAnnotationNames class page. In it, one can read the following:

Names for well-known relational model annotations. Applications should not use these names directly, but should instead use the extension methods on metadata objects.

However, I couldn't find anything on the first two pages that would explain what string value is returned? The only way for me to know was to decompile the code with F12 under Visual Studio (or to try displaying the value in the console). Am I missing something here?

(Also, is there a reason why no MappingStrategy enum was declared and returned by these methods? These inheritance mapping strategies (TPH, TPT, TPC) have been around for quite some time now?)

Page URL

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/microsoft.entityframeworkcore.metadata.relationalannotationnames?view=efcore-10.0

Content source URL

https://github.com/dotnet/EntityFramework.ApiDocs/blob/live/dotnet/xml/Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.Metadata/RelationalAnnotationNames.xml

Document Version Independent Id

db3690ad-9eae-1a5e-7763-36c61b77565d

Platform Id

ae8bff5f-4b07-8768-623a-e875091681ff

Article author

@dotnet-bot

[AndriySvyryd]

It returns a string to allow providers to add other mapping strategies like #10739