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Relationships - .NET SDK

On this page

  • Define a Relationship Property
  • To-One Relationship
  • To-Many Relationship
  • Inverse Relationship
  • Summary

Realm allows you to define explicit relationships between the types of objects in an App. A relationship is an object property that references another Realm object rather than one of the primitive data types. You define relationships by setting the property type to another Realm class.

Important

Inheritance

All Realm objects inherit from the IRealmObject, IEmbeddedObject, or IAsymmetricObject interface and must be declared partial classes.

In versions of the .NET SDK older than 10.18.0, objects derive from RealmObject, EmbeddedObject, or AsymmetricObject base classes. This approach to Realm model definition is still supported, but does not include new features such as the nullability annotations. In a future SDK release, the base classes will become deprecated. You should use the interfaces for any new classes that you write and should consider migrating your existing classes.

Relationships are direct references to other objects in a realm, which means that you don't need bridge tables or explicit joins to define a relationship like you would in a relational database. Instead, you can access related objects by reading and writing to the property that defines the relationship. Realm executes read operations lazily as they come in, so querying a relationship is just as performant as reading a regular property.

Tip

See also:

Alternatively, you can define your relationships in your App Services app.

There are three primary types of relationships between objects:

A to-one relationship means that an object is related in a specific way to no more than one other object. You define a to-one relationship for an object type in its object schema by specifying a property where the type is the related Realm object type.

Example

An application could use the following object schemas to indicate that a Person may or may not own a single Dog by including it in its dog property:

public partial class Person : IRealmObject
{
[PrimaryKey]
[MapTo("_id")]
public ObjectId Id { get; set; }
public string Name { get; set; }
public DateTimeOffset Birthdate { get; set; }
public Dog? Dog { get; set; }
}
public partial class Dog : IRealmObject
{
[PrimaryKey]
[MapTo("_id")]
public ObjectId Id { get; set; }
public string Name { get; set; }
public int Age { get; set; }
public string Breed { get; set; } = String.Empty;
}

To query a direct relationship, you can use LINQ syntax. See the following example for how to query a one-to-one relationship:

var fidosPerson = realm.All<Person>().FirstOrDefault(p => p.Dog == dog);

A to-many relationship means that an object is related in a specific way to multiple objects. You define a to-many relationship for an object type by specifying a property where the type is an IList<T> of the related Realm object type. Define the IList<T> with only a getter. You do not need to initialize it in the constructor, as Realm will generate a collection instance the first time the property is accessed:

// To add items to the IList<T>:
var person = new Person();
person.Dogs.Add(new Dog
{
Name = "Caleb",
Age = 7,
Breed = "mutt"
});

Example

An application could use the following object schemas to indicate that a Person may own multiple Dogs by including them in its dog property:

public partial class Person : IRealmObject
{
[PrimaryKey]
[MapTo("_id")]
public ObjectId Id { get; set; }
public string Name { get; set; }
public DateTimeOffset Birthdate { get; set; }
public IList<Dog> Dogs { get; }
}
public partial class Dog : IRealmObject
{
[PrimaryKey]
[MapTo("_id")]
public ObjectId Id { get; set; }
public string Name { get; set; }
public int Age { get; set; }
public string Breed { get; set; } = String.Empty;
}

To see the to-many relationship of Person to Dog, you query for the Person and get that person's Dogs:

var katieAndHerDogs = realm.All<Person>().
Where(p => p.Name == "Katie")
.FirstOrDefault();

An inverse relationship links an object back to any other objects that refer to it in a defined to-one or to-many relationship. Relationship definitions are unidirectional, so you must explicitly define a property in the object's model as an inverse relationship.

For example, the to-many relationship "a User has many Items" does not automatically create the inverse relationship "an Item belongs to one User". If you don't specify the inverse relationship in the object model, you need to run a separate query to look up the user that is assigned to a given item.

To define the inverse relationship, define a getter-only IQueryable<T> property in your object model, where T is the source type of the relationship, and then annotate this property with a [Backlink(sourceProperty)] attribute, where "sourceProperty" is the name of the property on the other side of the relationship. The following example shows how to do this with the "User has many Items" scenario:

public partial class User : IRealmObject
{
[PrimaryKey]
[MapTo("_id")]
public ObjectId Id { get; set; } = ObjectId.GenerateNewId();
public string Name { get; set; }
[Backlink(nameof(Item.Assignee))]
public IQueryable<Item> Items { get; }
}
public partial class Item : IRealmObject
{
[PrimaryKey]
[MapTo("_id")]
public ObjectId Id { get; set; } = ObjectId.GenerateNewId();
public string Text { get; set; }
public User? Assignee { get; set; }
}

In this example, note that:

  • The Item object's Assignee property is a User object.

  • The User object's Items property inverts the relationship and refers to all Item objects that contain this specific User in their Assignee property.

This, then, allows us to query the Item collection to get all Items assigned to a specific User.

To query the inverse relationship, you cannot use Linq. Instead, pass a string predicate. The following example shows how you could find all Users who have Items that contain the word "oscillator":

var oscillatorAssignees = realm.All<User>()
.Filter("Items.Text CONTAINS 'oscillator'").ToList();
foreach (User u in oscillatorAssignees)
{
Console.WriteLine(u.Name);
}
  • A relationship is an object property that allows an object to reference other objects of the same or another object type.

  • Relationships are direct references. You can access related objects directly through a relationship property without writing any type of join.

  • Realm supports to-one, to-many, and inverse relationships.

Back

Manually Define a Schema