Even though Marten is a library to enable document database storage semantics, because it’s built on top of (the advanced JSON features) of PostgreSQL, and PostgreSQL itself is relational, we can add constraints between document instances just as we would do in relational normalised databases.

For example, the following two simplified classes represent an order that points to a customer document:

class Customer
{
    public int Id { get; set; }
    public string Name { get; set; }
    
    // etc.
}

class Order
{
    public int Id { get; set; }
    public int CustomerId { get; set; }
    public int Quantity { get; set; }
    
    // etc.
}

By default there is no referential integrity enforcing the idea that the CustomerId in the Order class must point to an existing Customer document in the database. This means that the following code succeeds with no errors:

const string connectionString = "host = localhost; database = OrderDb; password = g7qo84nck22i; username = postgres";

var store = DocumentStore.For(connectionString);

using (var session = store.OpenSession())
{
    var order = new Order
    {
        Quantity=42,
        CustomerId = 34567 // non-existent
    };

    session.Store(order);

    session.SaveChanges(); // no error
}

The preceding code will result in an order document being stored with an invalid CustomerId.

Marten can be configured to enforce this by either adding the [ForeignKey(typeof(Customer))] attribute to the CustomerId property or by configuring the document store as the following code shows:

var store = DocumentStore.For(configure =>
{
    configure.Connection(connectionString);
    configure.Schema.For<Order>().ForeignKey<Customer>(x => x.CustomerId);
});

Now running the code again will result in an exception: insert or update on table "mt_doc_order" violates foreign key constraint "mt_doc_order_customer_id_fkey”.

If the code is modified to create a valid customer in the same session, Marten will generate a customer Id that can then be used in the order. When SaveChanges() is called, Marten will save the dependent customer document first and then the order document that points to it. The following code executes successfully:

using (var session = store.OpenSession())
{
    var customer = new Customer {Name = "Sarah"};

    session.Store(customer);
    
    // customer now has an Id auto-generated 

    var order = new Order
    {
        Quantity = 42,
        CustomerId = customer.Id // valid existing customer ID
    };

    session.Store(order);

    session.SaveChanges();
}

To learn more about the document database features of Marten check out my Pluralsight courses: Getting Started with .NET Document Databases Using Marten and Working with Data and Schemas in Marten.

You can start watching with a Pluralsight free trial.

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