EF Core 6: Custom functions with DbFunctionAttribute

We’ve already looked at way to implement SQL functions via method translation. That went reasonably well, but next time we had to do something similar we discovered that our code is broken with newer versions of EF Core. We fixed it again.

Not anymore

Looking through changelogs, we noticed that EF Core 2.0 came with support for mapping scalar functions. It is remarkably simple to set up:

public class MyDbContext : DbContext
    {

        [DbFunction("DECRYPTBYPASSPHRASE", IsBuiltIn = true, IsNullable = false)]
        public static byte[] DecryptByPassphrase(string pass, byte[] ciphertext) => throw new NotImplementedException();

        [DbFunction("DECRYPTBYKEY", IsBuiltIn = true, IsNullable = false)]
        public static byte[] DecryptByKey(byte[] ciphertext) => throw new NotImplementedException();
...

and even easier to use:

var filteredSet = Set
                .Select(m => new Model
                {
                    Id = m.Id,
                    Decrypted = MyDbContext.DecryptByPassphrase("TestPassword", m.Encrypted).ToString(),
                    Decrypted2 = MyDbContext.DecryptByKey(m.Encrypted2).ToString(), // since the key's opened for session scope - just relying on it should do the trick
                }).ToList();

Initially the attribute was offering limited configuration options, but starting with EF Core 5.0, this is not an issue.

One gotcha with DECRYPT* functions is they return varbinary. Trying to use our own EF.Functions.ConvertToVarChar is not going to work since we disabled custom plugins. We want to get rid of this code after all. But apparently .ToString() works as intended:

SELECT [m].[Id], CONVERT(varchar(100), DECRYPTBYPASSPHRASE(N'TestPassword', [m].[Encrypted])) AS [Decrypted], CONVERT(varchar(100), DECRYPTBYKEY([m].[Encrypted2])) AS [Decrypted2], [t].[Id], [t].[IsSomething], [m].[Encrypted], [m].[Encrypted2]...

Full example source is in GitHub, along with other takes we decided to leave in place for history.

Conclusion

Defining custom EF functions was one of the biggest articles we wrote. And finding out how to fit it together probably was the most challenging and time-consuming project we undertook in recorded history. One can say we totally wasted our time, but I’d like to draw a different conclusion. We had fun, learned something new and were able to appreciate the complexity behind Entity Framework – it is not just an engineering marvel – it is also a magical beast!