EF Core navigation property without relations(foreign-key) - entity-framework-core

Question

I have three classes
public class Country
{
[Key, DatabaseGenerated(DatabaseGeneratedOption.Identity)]
public byte CountryID { get; set; }
public byte OfficialLangID { get; set; }
}
public class Language
{
[Key, DatabaseGenerated(DatabaseGeneratedOption.Identity)]
public byte LangID { get; set; }
}
public class Name
{
[Key, DatabaseGenerated(DatabaseGeneratedOption.Identity)]
public byte NameID { get; set; }
public bool isLanguage { get; set; } // true for language - false for country
public byte FK { get; set; } // FK=LangID or CountryID
}
Now I want to create Navigation properties:
Country.Name
Language.Name
Name.Language
Name.Country
I want to do it in this way for many reasons, one of them to search for all the names in one table without joining.
Please don't suggest another way,I want navigation properties for my way.

Answer 1

why you're doing it like this? putting a boolean field to check the type of the entity here doesn't make any sense? in the end, the ef framework will create 2 tables.
here is my approach:
public class Country
{
public byte Id {get;set;}
public string Name {get;set;}
public int LanguageId {get;set;}
}
public class Language
{
public byte Id {get;set;}
public string Name {get;set;}
// assuming that each language may have one or many countries
public ICollection<Country> Countries {get;set;}
}
ef core here will create the tables and the relations automatically. now if you see some code duplications (like I've understood), that the 2 entities use the same field types and names, here is what you can do
public abstract class EntityBase
{
public byte Id {get;set;}
public string Name {get;set;}
}
now inherit this abstract class to the entity class
public class Country : EntityBase
{
public int LanguageId {get;set;}
}
public class Language : EntityBase
{
public ICollection<Country> Countries {get;set;}
}