change-tracking

$npx mdskill add dotnet/efcore/change-tracking

Detects and manages entity state changes in EF Core using InternalEntityEntry and related components

  • Automatically tracks and detects changes to entities during SaveChanges.
  • Depends on InternalEntityEntry for per-entity state management, SnapshotFactoryFactory for snapshot creation, and PropertyAccessorsFactory for property accessor compilation.
  • Decides what actions to take based on entity states and change detection results.
  • Delivers detected changes through the `DetectChanges` method, updating entities accordingly.

SKILL.md

.github/skills/change-trackingView on GitHub ↗
---
name: change-tracking
description: 'Implementation details for EF Core change tracking. Use when changing InternalEntityEntry, ChangeDetector, SnapshotFactoryFactory, or related entity state, snapshot, or property accessor code.'
user-invocable: false
---

# Change Tracking

Manages entity states and detects changes for `SaveChanges()`.

## Core Components

- `StateManager` — central engine, identity maps, tracks all entities
- `InternalEntityEntry` — per-entity state, property flags, snapshots
- `SnapshotFactoryFactory` subclasses build snapshot factories for change detection
- `PropertyAccessorsFactory`, `ClrPropertyGetterFactory` and `ClrPropertySetterFactory` compile property accessors for efficient snapshotting and change detection
  - Ordinals in `indices` parameter specify element at each complex collection depth

## Testing

Unit tests: `test/EFCore.Tests/ChangeTracking/`. Functional tests: `test/EFCore.Specification.Tests/GraphUpdates/`.

## Common Pitfalls

| Pitfall | Solution |
|---------|----------|
| There is a failure when there is shared identity entry (Added and Deleted) | Add code that checks `SharedIdentityEntry` |

## Validation

- `DetectChanges()` identifies modified properties via snapshot comparison
- Setting original values marks properties as modified or unchanged based on comparison with current values

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