Property Element (SSDL)

The Property element in store schema definition language (SSDL) represents a column in a table in the underlying database. Property elements are children of EntityType elements, which represent rows in a table. Each Property element defined on an EntityType element represents a column.

A Property element cannot have any child elements.

Applicable Attributes

The following table describes the attributes that can be applied to the Property element.

Attribute Name	Is Required	Value
Name	Yes	The name of the corresponding column.
Type	Yes	The type of the corresponding column.
Nullable	No	True (the default value) or False depending on whether the corresponding column can have a null value.
DefaultValue	No	The default value of the corresponding column.
MaxLength	No	The maximum length of the corresponding column.
FixedLength	No	True or False depending on whether the corresponding column value will be stored as a fixed length string.
Precision	No	The precision of the corresponding column.
Scale	No	The scale of the corresponding column.
Unicode	No	True or False depending on whether the corresponding column value will be stored as a Unicode string.
Collation	No	A string that specifies the collating sequence to be used in the data source.
StoreGeneratedPattern	No	None, Identity (if the corresponding column value is an identity that is generated in the database), or Computed (if the corresponding column value is computed in the database).

Note

Any number of annotation attributes (custom XML attributes) may be applied to the Property element. However, custom attributes may not belong to any XML namespace that is reserved for SSDL. The fully-qualified names for any two custom attributes cannot be the same.

Example

The following example shows an EntityType element with two child Property elements:

<EntityType Name="Customers">
  <Documentation>
    <Summary>Summary here.</Summary>
    <LongDescription>Long description here.</LongDescription>
  </Documentation>
  <Key>
    <PropertyRef Name="CustomerId" />
  </Key>
  <Property Name="CustomerId" Type="int" Nullable="false" />
  <Property Name="Name" Type="nvarchar(max)" Nullable="false" />
</EntityType>

See Also

Concepts

Entity Framework Overview
SSDL Specification

Other Resources

CSDL, SSDL, and MSL Specifications
ADO.NET Entity Data Model Tools