Business Events

Business events let you set up triggers for Entity commands.

To create a new event, click on Add event, select a command and name the event. Then click Edit to select triggers.

Events can be triggered when an entity is created or updated, when a child entity is added, updated or removed, or on a change of a specific entity attribute.

Execution Mode

Each event has an Execution Mode that controls how the triggered command runs:

Queued (default)

The triggered command is placed in the command queue and executed asynchronously after the current request completes. This is the standard behavior and is suitable for most use cases.

Inline

The triggered command runs synchronously within the triggering command's context. It is executed on SaveChanges() — including the implicit save at the end of the command.

Use Inline when the triggered command's changes must be part of the same logical operation and visible to the user immediately (e.g. automatically populating related data when an entity is created).

Infinite loop prevention: if a command triggers itself — directly or indirectly — the repeated invocation is detected and skipped automatically.

Suppressing events inside a command: if you need to save intermediate changes without triggering further events, call database.SaveChangesWithoutEventPropagation() instead of SaveChanges(). This commits the changes to the database but does not evaluate any business event triggers.

Deleting an entity does not fire events regardless of execution mode, because the entity no longer exists when events would be evaluated.