Adding new column using Update-Database in Entity Framework Core

Question

c# database entity-framework entity-framework-core

May be i'm missing something very obvious. But i haven't been able to figure out a way to add a new column to an existing table/model in EF Core.

And this is what i have done so far:

Created migration using this command: "Add-Migration -Name CodingSoldierDbContextMigration -OutputDir Migrations -Context CodingSoldierDbContext"
Updated database using the command: "Update-Database -Migration CodingSoldierDbContextMigration -Context CodingSoldierDbContext". Tables got created in the Database.
Now i need to add a new column to an existing table. I add that column to the model in the .cs file. And i remove the existing migration: "Remove-Migration -Force -Context CodingSoldierDbContext"
Now i re-run the commands in steps 1 and 2. Add-Migration works and migration gets created. But Update-Database fails with the error: "There is already an object named 'AspNetRoles' in the database." which means the table is already present in the database which makes sense.

So how do i update an already existing table table ? 2 ways i can think of are:

Drop the database. Create migration and update database. But all data will be gone.
Add column in the model. Manually update the Table using a SQL script to add the new column.

But i feel there should be a better way to do this.

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Boney · Accepted Answer · 10/3/2017 10:12:07 AM

This is how i resolved the issue. Not sure if it is the perfect way.

Key is NOT to delete the initial migration, before you create the new migration.

Adding the steps here:

Creating initial migration: "Add-Migration -Name CodingSoldierDbContextMigration -OutputDir Migrations -Context CodingSoldierDbContext"
Updated database using the command: "Update-Database -Migration CodingSoldierDbContextMigration -Context CodingSoldierDbContext". Tables gets created in the Database.
Added new field in one of the models.
Creating updated migration: "Add-Migration -Name CodingSoldierDbContextMigrationUpdated -OutputDir Migrations -Context CodingSoldierDbContext". This migration will have code only for updating the existing table.
Updating DB with the updated migration: "Update-Database -Migration CodingSoldierDbContextMigrationUpdated". Ideally this should have resolved it. But for me, it gave error because(as from Verbose logs) it was trying to update with initial migration: "CodingSoldierDbContextMigration", i don't know why.
So i generate scripts using Script-Migration: "Script-Migration -From CodingSoldierDbContextMigration -Idempotent -Output C:\MigrationScript.sql -Context CodingSoldierDbContext". It generated the script which had changes only from the updated migration. Running that script in DB created the column and added the migration entry in "__EFMigrationsHistory" table.