"POCO" Convention" and EntitySuffix in Scaffold-DbContext?

[RandyBuchholz]

Sometimes it seems that the entity objects that EF creates get in my way from a naming perspective. For example, I may have a "Consumer" table in my database, and a "Consumer" domain object in my business objects. If I'm doing DB first, EF creates a Consumer entity object that eats up that name when I scaffold. There are some approaches to minimize the problem here, like just using namespaces, but of course there are drawbacks to that. Prior to Core I used partial classes to help address this type of thing and they worked pretty well. But with Core the built-in DI limits this since you can only have a single constructor on classes that use this container. Another sometimes concern is that I'm exposing my entities if I let users access my context directly, so I push these down a layer, which then adds another "name duplication concern". I am wondering if it makes sense to add something like a "POCO Convention" to EF. I'm not sure exactly how it would work, but I wanted to start a discussion.

In the most simple form the objects defined in a context could follow the naming convention ...Entity - ConsumerEntity. In this way we would know that the type definition for this class has some relationship to EF. Just like other convention-based approaches tooling/components can be aware if they want to and ignore if they don't. For the DB first people (like me) we could have a switch on Scaffold-DbContext called -EntitySuffix if present it would add the suffix "Entity" to the entity classes.

I think just adding a -suffix switch to scaffold would be valuable in some scenarios and may be an easy way to help get this started. If I could do Scaffold-DbContext ... -suffix Entity and have it add the suffix in the right places that would help with my naming extra work.

[ajcvickers]

Note for triage: templates?

[bricelam]

We have items on our backlog to improve the extension points of Reverse Engineer (including via templates). Until then, you can use the method described in https://gist.github.com/natemcmaster/353f4ab3efb4514eeaec846df28f0e24

[bricelam]

Closing as a dupe of #4038