Mapping inheritance hierarchies with EF Core
Imagine that you have an inheritance hierarchy for some C# classes to store information about students and employees, both of which are types of people. All people have a name and an ID to uniquely identify them, students have a subject they are studying, and employees have a hire date, as shown in the following code:
public abstract class Person
{
public int Id { get; set; }
public string? Name { get; set; }
}
public class Student : Person
{
public string? Subject { get; set; }
}
public class Employee : Person
{
public DateTime HireDate { get; set; }
}
By default, EF Core will map these to a single table using the table-per-hierarchy (TPH) mapping strategy. EF Core 5 introduced support for the table-per-type (TPT) mapping strategy. EF Core 7 introduced support for the table-per-concrete-type (TPC) mapping strategy. Let’s explore the differences between these mapping strategies.
