Naming Conventions for Entity Framework Core Tables and Columns

By default, EF Core will map to tables and columns named exactly after your .NET classes and properties. For example, mapping a typical Customer class to PostgreSQL will result in SQL such as the following:

CREATE TABLE "Customers" (
    "Id" integer NOT NULL GENERATED BY DEFAULT AS IDENTITY,
    "FullName" text NULL,
    CONSTRAINT "PK_Customers" PRIMARY KEY ("Id")
);

SELECT c."Id", c."FullName"
    FROM "Customers" AS c
    WHERE c."FullName" = 'John Doe';

For PostgreSQL specifically, this forces double-quotes to be added since unquoted identifiers are automatically converted to lower-case - and all those quotes are an eye-sore. But even if we're using another database such as SQL Server, maybe we just hate seeing upper-case letters in our database, and would rather have another naming convention.

Down with same-name identifier tyranny! Simply add a reference to EFCore.NamingConventions and enable a naming convention in your model's OnConfiguring method:

protected override void OnConfiguring(DbContextOptionsBuilder optionsBuilder)
    => optionsBuilder
        .UseNpgsql(...)
        .UseSnakeCaseNamingConvention();

This will automatically make all your table and column names have snake_case naming:

CREATE TABLE customers (
            id integer NOT NULL GENERATED BY DEFAULT AS IDENTITY,
            full_name text NULL,
            CONSTRAINT "PK_customers" PRIMARY KEY (id);

SELECT c.id, c.full_name
        FROM customers AS c
        WHERE c.full_name = 'John Doe';

Supported naming conventions

• UseSnakeCaseNamingConvention: FullName becomes full_name
• UseLowerCaseNamingConvention: FullName becomes fullname
• UseCamelCaseNamingConvention: FullName becomes fullName
• UseUpperCaseNamingConvention: FullName becomes FULLNAME
• UseUpperSnakeCaseNamingConvention: FullName becomes FULL_NAME

Have another naming convention in mind? Open an issue or even submit a PR - it's pretty easy to do!

Important notes

• If you have an existing database, adding this naming convention will cause a migration to produced, renaming everything. Be very cautious when doing this (the process currently involves dropping and recreating primary keys).
• This plugin will work with any database provider and isn't related to PostgreSQL or Npgsql in any way.
• This is a community-maintained plugin: it isn't an official part of Entity Framework Core and isn't supported by Microsoft in any way.