EF Core with CosmosDB: OwnsOne and OwnsMany throw NullReferenceException - .net-core

Question

I'm working on a new project that uses CosmosDB and Entity Framework Core (via the Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.Cosmos NuGet package, version 5.0.7; the project itself is .NET Core 5). I'm new to both, and running into an issue I can't sort out.
In short, I need to save a complex object to the database. It's a big model that will have multiple collections of classes underneath it, each with their own properties and some with collections underneath them as well. I'm trying to configure EF with OwnsOne and OwnsMany to store these child objects underneath the top-level one. The code compiles, and will save to the database so long as all the owned objects are left empty. But whenever I put anything into an owned object, either with OwnsOne or OwnsMany, I get a pair of NullReferenceExceptions.
I've tried to strip my code down to the very basics. Here's how it currently looks.
Owner and owned classes:
public class Questionnaire
{
// Constructors
private Questionnaire() { }
public Questionnaire(Guid id)
{
Test = "Test property.";
TV = new TestQ();
Id = id;
}
public Guid Id { get; set; }
public string Test { get; set; }
public TestQ TV { get; set; }
// Public Methods
public void AddForm(Form f)
{
// not currently using this method
//Forms.Add(f);
}
}
public class TestQ
{
public TestQ()
{
TestValue = "test ownsone value";
}
public string TestValue { get; set; }
}
DbContext:
public class QuestionnaireDbContext : DbContext
{
public DbSet<Questionnaire> Questionnaires { get; set; }
public QuestionnaireDbContext(DbContextOptions<QuestionnaireDbContext> options) : base(options) { }
protected override void OnModelCreating(ModelBuilder modelBuilder)
{
modelBuilder.HasDefaultContainer(nameof(Questionnaires));
modelBuilder.Entity<Questionnaire>().HasKey(q => q.Id);
modelBuilder.Entity<Questionnaire>().OwnsOne(q => q.TV);
}
}
And the code from the service that calls the dbContext (note that this is based on a generic service that I didn't set up originally). The actual exceptions are thrown here.
public virtual TEntity Add(TEntity entity)
{
_context.Entry(entity).State = EntityState.Added;
_context.SaveChanges();
return entity;
}
Ultimately I need this to work with OwnsMany and a collection, but I figured it might be simpler to get it working with OwnsOne first. The key thing to note here is that if I comment out the line
TV = new TestQ();
in the Questionnaire class, the model persists correctly into CosmosDB. It's only when I actually instantiate an owned entity that I get the NullReferenceExceptions.
Any advice would be much appreciated! Thank you!

Answer 1

Well, I'm not sure why this is the case, but the issue turned out to be with how we were adding the document. Using this generic code:
public virtual async Task<TEntity> Add(TEntity entity)
{
_context.Entry(entity).State = EntityState.Added;
await _context.SaveChanges();
return entity;
}
was the issue. It works just fine if I use the actual QuestionnaireDbContext class like so:
context.Add(questionnaire);
await context.SaveChangesAsync();