Entity Framework 4.0 Automatically Truncate/Trim String Before Insert

Question

Suppose I have a table with the column Description, varchar(100). If try to insert a string with more than 100 characters, the insert will fail.

Is there a way in Entity Framework to automatically truncate or trim the string to fit into the column before inserting into the column? In my scenario, I really don't care whether the string is truncated, I just want it inserted rather than just failing and logging the rror.

Since the model already knows the length limits, I was thinking there might be a way for Entity Framework to do this for me.

If this is not supported, what is the best way to do this? Extend the auto-generated partial classes and override the On*Changed methods? I would prefer not to hard-code the length limits, but rather use the length limits already defined in the entity model. How could I get access to this?

Edit

My final solution was to implement the On*Changed partial method of the autogenerated entity.

I used this method of getting the ObjectContext from the entity instance, and then used the below method to extract the max length, and truncate the string.

Answer 1

This will give you the max length of a column..

public int? GetColumnMaxLength(ObjectContext context, string entityTypeName, string columnName)
    {
        int? result = null;

        Type entType = Type.GetType(entityTypeName);
        var q = from meta in context.MetadataWorkspace.GetItems(DataSpace.CSpace)
                          .Where(m => m.BuiltInTypeKind == BuiltInTypeKind.EntityType)
                from p in (meta as EntityType).Properties
                .Where(p => p.Name == columnName
                            && p.TypeUsage.EdmType.Name == "String")
                select p;

        var queryResult = q.Where(p =>
        {
            bool match = p.DeclaringType.Name == entityTypeName;
            if (!match && entType != null)
            {
                //Is a fully qualified name....
                match = entType.Name == p.DeclaringType.Name;
            }

            return match;

        }).Select(sel => sel.TypeUsage.Facets["MaxLength"].Value);
        if (queryResult.Any())
        {
            result = Convert.ToInt32(queryResult.First());
        }

        return result;
    }

Answer 2

Here's my One-Line Solution

(invoking it is one line, the implementation is a little more)

I took the code from @elbweb and adapted it for my purposes. In my case I was parsing EDI files, some of which had 15 different levels to the hierarchy and I didn't want to explicitly specify all 15 different types - I wanted a one-liner that worked for all entity types.

It's a bit different but it's now painless to call. There is definitely a performance hit on this but it's acceptable for me. Essentially put this inside of your DbContext class and then it's a one-liner to manually call (or you can automatically call it by overriding SaveChanges to invoke it).

Code in your DbContext:

public class MyContext : DbContext
{

    ...

    public void TruncateAllStringsOnAllEntitiesToDbSize()
    {
        var objectContext = ((IObjectContextAdapter) this).ObjectContext;

        var stringMaxLengthsFromEdmx =
                objectContext.MetadataWorkspace
                             .GetItems(DataSpace.CSpace)
                             .Where(m => m.BuiltInTypeKind == BuiltInTypeKind.EntityType)
                             .SelectMany(meta => ((EntityType) meta).Properties
                             .Where(p => p.TypeUsage.EdmType.Name == "String"))
                             .Select(d => new
                                          {
                                              MaxLength = d.TypeUsage.Facets["MaxLength"].Value,
                                              PropName = d.Name,
                                              EntityName = d.DeclaringType.Name
                                          })
                             .Where(d => d.MaxLength is int)
                             .Select(d => new {d.PropName, d.EntityName, MaxLength = Convert.ToInt32(d.MaxLength)})
                             .ToList();

        var pendingEntities = ChangeTracker.Entries().Where(e => e.State == EntityState.Added || e.State == EntityState.Modified).Select(x => x.Entity).ToList();
        foreach (var entityObject in pendingEntities)
        {
            var relevantFields = stringMaxLengthsFromEdmx.Where(d => d.EntityName == entityObject.GetType().Name).ToList();

            foreach (var maxLengthString in relevantFields)
            {
                var prop = entityObject.GetType().GetProperty(maxLengthString.PropName);
                if (prop == null) continue;

                var currentValue = prop.GetValue(entityObject);
                var propAsString = currentValue as string;
                if (propAsString != null && propAsString.Length > maxLengthString.MaxLength)
                {
                    prop.SetValue(entityObject, propAsString.Substring(0, maxLengthString.MaxLength));
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

Consumption

try
{
    innerContext.TruncateAllStringsOnAllEntitiesToDbSize();
    innerContext.SaveChanges();
}
catch (DbEntityValidationException e)
{
    foreach (var err in e.EntityValidationErrors)
    {
        log.Write($"Entity Validation Errors: {string.Join("\r\n", err.ValidationErrors.Select(v => v.PropertyName + "-" + v.ErrorMessage).ToArray())}");
    }
    throw;
}

Before this code, the SaveChanges would trigger the catch in my example above when you tried inserting a string that was too large. After adding the TruncateAllStringsOnAllEntitiesToDbSize line, it works great now! I'm sure there are some optimizations that can go into this, so do please critique/contribute! :-)

Note: I have only tried this on EF 6.1.3

Answer 3

I took some of the logic from Richard's answer and turned it into a method to truncate all strings of an entity framework object based on their max length, if they're limited.

public static void TruncateStringsInEFObject<T>(List<T> entityObjects, ObjectContext context)
{
    var stringMaxLengthsFromEdmx = context.MetadataWorkspace.GetItems(DataSpace.CSpace)
        .Where(m => m.BuiltInTypeKind == BuiltInTypeKind.EntityType)
        .SelectMany(meta => (meta as EntityType).Properties
            .Where(p => p.TypeUsage.EdmType.Name == "String"
                        && p.DeclaringType.Name == typeof(T).Name))
        .Select(d => new {MaxLength = d.TypeUsage.Facets["MaxLength"].Value, d.Name})
        .Where(d => d.MaxLength is int)
        .Select(d => new {d.Name, MaxLength = Convert.ToInt32(d.MaxLength)})
        .ToList();

    foreach (var maxLengthString in stringMaxLengthsFromEdmx)
    {
        var prop = typeof(T).GetProperty(maxLengthString.Name);
        if (prop == null) continue;

        foreach (var entityObject in entityObjects)
        {
            var currentValue = prop.GetValue(entityObject);
            var propAsString = currentValue as string;
            if (propAsString != null && propAsString.Length > maxLengthString.MaxLength)
            {
                prop.SetValue(entityObject, propAsString.Substring(0, maxLengthString.MaxLength));
            }
        }
    }