Base entity

In every database table in our application, we have CreatedAt, UpdatedAt, CreatedBy and UpdatedBy columns.

Manually managing these fields can bring errors, it`s why it should be populated automatically.

When we add a new entity model, we just have to add BaseEntity base class inheritance.

public abstract class BaseEntity
{
    public DateTime CreatedAt { get; set; }
    public DateTime UpdatedAt { get; set; }
    public int? CreatedBy { get; set; } = null;
    public int? UpdatedBy { get; set; } = null;
}

Note: the class is identified as abstract, we can't instantiate directly a BaseEntity. It must be inherited from another class. CreatedBy and UpdatedBy are nullable, because sometimes we can add entities in database and a user is not necessarily logged.

References

• Automatically set created and modified date on each record in EF Core
• How to Auto Generate Created / Updated Field in EF
• How to add creator/modified info to all of your EF models at once in .NET Core