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megaman7's avatar

Laravel Eloquent vs C# entity framework

This question discusses the differences between the core way in which Laravel's Eloquent and C#'s Entity frameworks are used by the developer.

In Eloquent you create Model classes which extend Eloquent (or another class which extends Eloquent such as ValidationModel).

In Entity framework you have a central class which extends DBContext and this class lists a load of model classes using DBSet

In Eloquent you create an instance of a model class every time you need DB access in your code

In Entity framework you create an instance of the central class every time you need DB access in your code

In both cases there is a base class which interfaces with the database and provides lots of database functions. In both cases you have models to represent tables.

The difference is that Eloquent the models directly extend the database base class and are used directly every time you need DB access. In entity framework there is a middle class does these things.

Which way is better?

I would say the Entity framework way is better because it gives you access to the whole database every time you create an instance of the central class - creating an instance of a Laravel model only gives you access to that specific table and any relationships which have been defined.

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4 replies
topvillas's avatar

Why is better to have access to the whole database than just the model you want?

martinbean's avatar
Level 80

creating an instance of a Laravel model only gives you access to that specific table and any relationships which have been defined.

@megaman7 …and thus leads to easier-to-reason code that deals with only the one specific part of the application you’re working with, satisfying the ‘S’ in ‘SOLID’ (the single responsibility principle).

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jovs's avatar

I like the approach of eloquent, is there any way that I can use it in Entity Framework?

lucafabbri84's avatar

Hi Jovs, EntityFramework implements the Repository Pattern (the DbContext class is the Unit Of Work). The repository pattern abstracts the idea of a place where data is stored (ideally it should not even be a database). Eloquent is basically an ORM Object-Relational Mapping, which is a tecnique of abstract database tables and their relations. ORM techniques are also of course used in Repository Pattern as well. In order to use just ORM in C# you might not need Entity Framework with its complexity, but you can use simplier ORM like Dapper.

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