Creating blob properties with Entity Framework 4?

Question

I am creating an EF4 model-first application with a WPF UI. One of the controls on my UI is a RichTextDocument, which outputs a WPF FlowDocument. I can either serialize the FlowDocument to a byte array, or extract its XAML markup as a string. I would prefer to use binary serialization, if I can. Here are my questions:

• If I serialize to a byte array, how do I specify an entity property as a byte array in the EDM Designer?

• If I extract a XAML markup string, can I specify that the EDM Designer create the corresponding database column as a nvarchar(max) column?

As to the second question, I assume I could always manually edit the MyModel.edmx.sql file to change the data type from nvarchar(4000) to nvarchar(max) before executing it, but I would like to know if it can be done in the Designer.

Thanks for your help.

Answer 1

Finally got back to this one. Turns out that if it had been any more obvious, I'd have tripped over it. EDM has a Binary type that creates a property of type byte[] on an entity class. While the types in the EDM Designer generally match CLR type names, that's not true in all cases, as this issue shows.