ADO.NET in a Nutshell

The ForeignKeyConstraint

The ForeignKeyConstraint provides an easy way to impose referential integrity rules on records in a DataSet. The ForeignKeyConstraint serves two purposes: it prevents you from making DataSet changes that violate referential integrity, and it allows you to define what action to take with child rows when parent rows are updated or deleted.

When creating a ForeignKeyConstraint, you specify the parent and child DataColumn and optionally name the constraint. You add the ForeignKeyConstraint to the child DataTable. For example, the following code creates and applies a ForeignKeyConstraint that relates product records to a specific category:

ForeignKeyConstraint fc = new ForeignKeyConstraint("CategoryID",

  ds.Tables["Categories"].Columns["CategoryID"], 

  ds.Tables["Products"].Columns["CategoryID"]);



ds.Tables["Products"].Constraints.Add(fc);

Before performing this step, you should add a UniqueKeyConstraint on the CategoryID column in the parent (Categories) table to ensure that every relation can be resolved.

You can also pass constructor arguments to several overloads of the Add( ) method of a ConstraintCollection to create a ForeignKeyConstraint. The following code is equivalent to the previous example:

// Add a new ForeignKeyConstraint to the table's Constraints collection.

dt.Constraints.Add("CategoryID",

  ds.Tables["Categories"].Columns["CategoryID"], 

  ds.Tables["Products"].Columns["CategoryID"]);

When a ForeignKeyConstraint is in place, and constraint checking is ...