EF7 override Identity nullable columns.

[urielzen]

We have a project with nullable errors enabled, and we just recently upgraded from EF6 to EF7 and that uncovered some nullable errors in our code around Identity properties. Email for example is nullable in the Microsoft.AspNetCore.Identity.IdentityUser class

public class IdentityUser<TKey> where TKey : IEquatable<TKey>
{
    /// <summary>
    /// Gets or sets the email address for this user.
    /// </summary>
    [ProtectedPersonalData]
    public virtual string? Email { get; set; }

We would like to keep the email required/not nullable, so we don't have to refactor the thousand places in our code that are giving us errors because Email now is suddenly nullable. But if I try to override the nullability for the property in my ApplicationUser class, I get an error

public partial class ApplicationUser : IdentityUser<string>
{
    public override string Email { get; set; } = null!;

CS8765 - Nullability of type of parameter 'value' doesn't match overridden member (possibly because of nullability attributes).

I guess we can add the thousand null checks in our code where we have the errors, but we would very much like another easier to implement approach if possible.

Thanks

[urielzen]

I ended up doing creating a new property to shadow the base class, and customize the setter and getter to actually set/get from the base class.

It feels hacky, but it works. Please let me know if there is a better approach. Thank you.

  public new string Email
    {
        get => base.Email ?? "";
        set => base.Email = value;
    }

[roji]

@urielzen I'm not completely sure what you're asking above - the questions seem to be about C#'s nullability and not really related to EF. Note that for EF specifically, you can use the Fluent API to determine that a property is required (i.e. the corresponding column will never contain null in the database), regardless of what its C# nullability annotations are. However, that would still require you to check for nulls (or use bangs) when interacting with the property in .NET.

[ajcvickers]

Moving this to ASP.NET Core repo, since the question is about why Email is a nullable property in the ASP.NET Core Identity model.

[urielzen]

@ajcvickers @roji Thanks for moving to the correct repo, and thanks for the insight, yes I agree it wasn't EFCore7 what introduced the new error, but instead some new nullability error check in NET7 that wasn't in NET6.

NET6 didn't warn/error about overridden properties with different nullability, but NET7 does.

Our existing code, in NET6, used to think that the email property (and others) was not nullable so the code around that was written that way. We can use Fluent API to change the db, but that won't help with the many errors that now we have in the code, because the properties were actually nullable all this time. Checking for nulls or adding bangs is precisely the refactoring that we are trying to avoid.

Shadowing the properties as noted in my second comment above actually fixed it for us, without the need to do the full refactor.

Closing this as we are good with this solution. But I'm still open to hear from someone that can suggest a different approach.
Thanks!

[roji]

.NET 6.0 certainly did warn about overriding properties with different nullability - it's just that the identity types weren't yet annotated in ASP.NET 7.0 (this happened for 7.0 in #40007). Before 7.0, Email (and everything else) was simply oblivious, so the compiler didn't generate any warnings either way.