Operator '==' cannot be applied to operands of type 'System.Guid' and 'string' in linq to entity

Question

I am getting this error 'Operator '==' cannot be applied to operands of type 'System.Guid' and 'string'' in linq to entityframework below code. in the below code CustomerId is Guid and customerProfileId is string.

var accountQuery = from C in CustomerModel.CustomerProfile
                  where C.CustomerId == customerProfileId // Error here                    
                 select C;

Answer 1

You cannot compare a Guid to a string directly. Either convert the string to a Guid or the Guid to a string.

Converting a Guid to string is as easy as calling .ToString() on the variable, but it's important to know that there's more than one way to format the Guid. Either with or without dashes:

someguid.ToString() will give you something like B06A6881-003B-4183-A8AB-39B51809F196 someGuid.ToString("N") will return something like B06A6881003B4183A8AB39B51809F196

If you decide to convert C.CustomerId to a string make sure you know what format customerProfileId is in.

If it can be either format, you may be better off converting customerProfileId to a guid: new Guid(customerProfileId).

The downside of this is that the conversion from string to Guid will throw an exception if it's not formatted correctly. So, if you got the customerProfileId from user input (like a form field or URL) you should validate it first.

However, if you pull the conversion to Guid outside your query you'll probably end up with better performance since comparing Guids is probably faster than comparing strings.

var customerProfileGuid = new Guid(customerProfileId);  
// wrap in try catch if needed

var accountQuery = from C in CustomerModel.CustomerProfile
                   where C.CustomerId == customerProfileGuid                    
                   select C;