Scaffolded collection navigation properties do not have setters

[giarico]

Hello,

With EF7 all child entities are get only collections.
If I use the generated entities for deserialization, the child entities remain null.

Example of an entity with a child collection. Before EF7 it was get & set.

public partial class ComplaintType
{
    ...

    [InverseProperty("ComplaintType")]
    public virtual ICollection<LocalizedComplaintType> LocalizedComplaintTypes { get; } = new List<LocalizedComplaintType>();
}

When I try to deserialize the returned json to the ComplaintType object, the LocalizedComplaintTypes property is null
return await httpClient.GetFromJsonAsync<IEnumerable<ComplaintType>>(...);

If I modify the ComplaintType class putting set or init on LocalizedComplaintTypes property, it works.

Why this change in EF7? I had a lot of drawbacks... and not limited to this.
What is the workaround?

[ajcvickers]

Note for triage: it's unfortunate that this prevents the collection from being serialized, at least in System.Text.Json. We should consider adding the setter back because of this.

@giarico You can customize the T4 template to create setters.

[ErikEJ]

Thanks, @ajcvickers - I will add this as default in the next version of the templates supplied with EF Core Power Tools