Using Entity Framework 4.3 migration without depending on the actual database

Question

The EF migrations seem cool, but there is too much “magic” and very little explanation about what it actually does. All I want to do is set the intersection points and get the DDL scripts - either a "diff" script from one transition to another, or just create a DDL script.

The problem is that all migration commands seem to be dependent on the actual database present to do a lot of things that are not interesting to me. Is there a way around this and just work with migrations to generate scripts?

Answer 1

This was discussed yesterday . The migration commands are dependent on your production database because they interact with the __MigrationHistory table to get the actual state and correctly calculate what changes need to be made.

If you just need to create scripts, you can do this using Update-Database with additional parameters:

Create a script for the entire database:

 Update-Database -Script -SourceMigration:$InitialDatabase 

Create a script to move from migration A to migration B:

 Update-Database -Script -SourceMigration:"A" -TargetMigration:"B"