Creating EF 6 Models from the Designer and Code

The CData ADO.NET Provider for Microsoft Excel includes an Entity Framework 6 (EF6) provider. The following sections show how to build an EF data model that surfaces access to Microsoft Excel tables.

Register the EF6 Provider

Before a data model can be defined, it is necessary to first register the EF6 provider in the target application. See Using EF 6 to set up a project.

Model-First

The included EF6 provider can be used to derive database objects from live Microsoft Excel data. Model-First Approach shows how to generate a model using schema introspection.

Code-First

The code-first approach gives developers granular control over the data exposed in the data model. Code-First Approach shows how to manually define the entity definitions.