Pluralization in EF Core

We’ve been improving design-time extensibility in EF Core 2.1. One new feature is the ability for NuGet packages to register design-time services. As a reference implementation for how to do this, I’ve created the bricelam\EFCore.Pluralizer repo. While the repo primarily serves as a sample for anyone who wants to create design-time extensions for EF Core, anyone that uses EF Core with an existing database might find the Bricelam.EntityFrameworkCore.Pluralizer package useful.

This package is a port of the pluralizer used by EF6 when reverse engineering a model from andatabase. To use it, simply install it.

To install and use the package inside Visual Studio using NuGet’s Package Manager Console (PMC), type the following.

Install-Package Bricelam.EntityFrameworkCore.Pluralizer
Scaffold-DbContext 'Filename=chinook.db' Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.Sqlite

If you’re on a command-line instead, type this.

dotnet add package Bricelam.EntityFrameworkCore.Pluralizer
dotnet ef dbcontext scaffold "Filename=chinook.db" Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.Sqlite

After installing it, you’ll get pluralized DbSet property names…

class ChinookContext : DbContext
{
    public DbSet<Artist> Artists { get; set; }

    // ...
}

…and pluralized collection navigation property names.

class Artist
{
    // ...

    public ICollection<Album> Albums { get; set; }
}

It will also singularize entity type class names if you happen to have pluralized table names in your database.