Support unidirectional many-to-many relationships

Support shadow navigation properties such that views over the navigations can function even when a CLR type doesn’t have an actual navigation property. This would enable unidirectional many-to-many relationships like this:

class Post
{
  public int Id { get; set; }
  public ICollection<Tag> Tags { get; set; }
}

class Tag
{
  public int Id { get; set; }
}

builder.Entity<Post>()
  .HasMany(p => p.Tags)
  .WithMany();

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Original issue:

Are there any plans to support this?

table.Include(t => EF.Property<Entity>(t, "Property"))

[freer4]

Just a heads up, the documentation clearly states that single-property navigation is possible via a parameterless WithMany()

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/ef/core/modeling/relationships?tabs=fluent-api%2Cfluent-api-simple-key%2Csimple-key#single-navigation-property-1

As of 6.0.2 this does not work, who is in charge of the docs?

[anranruye]

I think using the following code may help to hide many-to-many navigation properties from out of entity types with current EF Core version(5.0.1)

class Post
{
  public int Id { get; set; }
  public ICollection<Tag> Tags { get; set; }
}

class Tag
{
  public int Id { get; set; }
  private ICollection<Post> Posts { get; set; }
}

builder.Entity<Post>()
  .HasMany(p => p.Tags)
  .WithMany("Posts");

Just mark the Posts property as private, ef core can work well and you can still use this navigation property inside Tag class. I prefer to field-only property, but it will make both navigations can not be loaded by explicit loading. See at #23717.