EF Core ValueGeneratedNever

The Entity Framework Core Fluent API ValueGeneratedNever provides a way to specify that the value for the selected property should never be generated automtically by the database. This is useful if you want to circumvent the database's default behaviour.

public class SampleContext : DbContext
{
    public DbSet<Contact> Contacts { get; set; }
    
    protected override void OnModelCreating(ModelBuilder modelBuilder)
    {
        modelBuilder.Entity<Car>()
            .Property(p => p.Id)
            .ValueGeneratedNever();
    } 

    public class Car
    {
        public int Id { get; set; }
        public string Model { get; set; }
        public string Email { get; set; } 
        public DateTime DateCreated { get; set; }
    }
}

Entity Framework Core does not implement a value generation strategy. Database providers differ in the way that values are automatically generated. Some will generated values for selected data types such as Identity, rowversion, GUID. Others may require manual configuration such as setting default values or triggers.

Data Annotations

The Data Annotations attribute equivalent of the ValueGeneratedNever method is the DatabaseGenerated attribute with the None option.

Previous Versions

In previous versions of Entity Framework, you would use the HasDatabaseGenerated method with the DatabaseGenerated.None enumeration to achieve the same outcome as the Entity Framework core ValueGeneratedNever method.