Reordering properties in EDMX designer

12 Apr 2014 2 mins Entity Framework, Visual Studio

I don’t remember when people started begging EF team to add support for reordering properties in EDMX designer. I think I first found the need around 2008. 😃 I hoped, guessing it’s a simple feature, to have it in some update to EF1. Sadly not. Only option, though simple, was to open the EDMX as a XML file and change the order of properties in CSDL part.

Until now. Yes it took few years, few major Entity Framework versions, but it’s finally there. But you might not know, as I didn’t. Until we found it this week while I was teaching my Entity Framework course. If you install Entity Framework 6.1 tooling you will get the new consolidated (Code First together with EDMX) tools/designer and some features previously available in EF Power Tools. When I installed it, I tried to reorder the properties using mouse and it didn’t worked. So I concluded it’s still 😉 not there.

But then we found it. You have to actually right click on a property and then there’s a menu to move it up or down (and also bigger steps). It even works with keyboard – Alt+Up or Alt+Down respectively, for the start. Nice! I’m more keyboard/console guy so I don’t mind missing “mouse support” (although I can imagine some people will find the current implementation incomplete).

There you have it. If you’re not actually reading the menus carefully and just clicking on familiar words as I do you might have missed it.

Jiří Činčura is .NET, C# and Firebird expert. He focuses on data and business layers, language constructs, parallelism, databases and performance. For almost two decades he contributes to open-source, i.e. FirebirdClient. He works as a senior software engineer for Microsoft. Frequent speaker and blogger at www.tabsoverspaces.com.