title: Best Practice - Mixing Table-Entities with View-Entities in EntityFramework?
body: <p>I have a legacy database that I'd like to interact with Entity Framework.</p>
  
  <p>The database is highly normalised for storing information about flights. In order to make it easier to work with some of the data, a number of SQL Views have been written to flatten data and to pivot certain multi-table joins into more logical information.</p>
  
  <p>After quickly looking over this I see two problems with using Views in EF.</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li><p>The Views contains lots and lots of Keys. Some quick googling seems to indicate I will need to manually edit the EDMX file to remove this info. </p></li>
  <li><p>The Views don't have any relationships to the other table entities. These associations need to be manually added in order to link a View -> Table.</p></li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>Both of these seem like major pain points when it comes to refreshing the Model from the DB, when teh DBA team make changes.</p>
  
  <p>Is this just something you need to "put up with" when working with EF or are there any suggested patterns/practices to deal with these.</p>