Article on CosmosDB's geospatial types should disclose that EF Core does not support them

[daiplusplus]

It's commonplace for developers to use CosmosDB via Entity Framework Core, however as of late 2021 EF Core still does not support using CosmosDB's geospatial types as complex-value-types in EF entity classes:

• Cosmos: Spatial types, functions and spatial indexes dotnet/efcore#17317
• Unable to use Microsoft.Azure.Documents.Spatial.Point in Entity dotnet/efcore#15896
• Constructor binding fails for type with read-only properties dotnet/efcore#14336

And this is becoming a gotcha for users unfamiliar with how EF works and that EF is fully separate from CosmosDB, for example: https://stackoverflow.com/q/60949543/159145

So a simple advisory in this article that makes it clear that using CosmosDB's own complex-types will not work when going through an ORM layer, like EF Core, instead of using CosmosDB's client lib/API directly.

---

Document Details

⚠ Do not edit this section. It is required for docs.microsoft.com ➟ GitHub issue linking.

• ID: 40e7ff0a-c1fc-70e9-10ba-8f8ec57cea2b
• Version Independent ID: 8f5c8c81-2d65-eb15-dc34-6f7864460389
• Content: Geospatial and GeoJSON location data in Azure Cosmos DB
• Content Source: articles/cosmos-db/sql/sql-query-geospatial-intro.md
• Service: cosmos-db
• Sub-service: cosmosdb-sql
• GitHub Login: @timsander1
• Microsoft Alias: tisande

[Grace-MacJones-MSFT]

Hi @Jehoel, thanks for bringing this to our attention. I have assigned the issue to the content author to evaluate and update this doc as appropriate

[markjbrown]

#assign:markjbrown

[markjbrown]

Thanks @Jehoel for your feedback and apologies for the very slow response.

Yes, EF does not yet have spatial support. I have made a note in that article to clearly call out there is no support for it today.

This change is now in a PR and should publish by tomorrow.

Thanks again for your help.

#please-close