I've been battling this for a while. I'm trying to implement a many to one association. I have a bunch of rows in a table, called readings. These accumulate over time, and every now and then I want to export them. When I export them I want to create a new object called ExportEvent, to track which rows were exported, so they can be re-exported if need be. Therefore Reading has a nullable foreign key relationship with ExportEvent, as I create the readings before I export them.
What I'm finding is that when I then do the export, whether I first create the ExportEvent (evt) and add the readings using
evt.Readings.AddRange(),
or if I use
foreach(reading)
reading.ExportEvent = evt
When I call SubmitChanges I am always getting a new bunch of readings created with the association to evt, and the original records aren't updated.
I pared this back to its simplest though, just to see if I could create the two objects with no association, and I even found when I just retrieved all the readings and updated an int value on them, submitchanges still inserted a bunch of new records. What's going on?
Hmmm. Interesting - just clicked this link in my bookmarks, and found that the question has been resurrected, so will provide the (embarrassing) solution. All of my entities have audit data properties on them - CreatedDate and UpdatedDate. Therefore I've implemented the partial methods for the insert and update of each entity in the datacontext. I had copied and pasted (how often is this the cause of some downfall) some of these insert and update methods for the newly created entities. As a result I'd also copied an error, where the Update[blah] methods were calling ExecuteDynamicInsert, instead of ExecuteDynamicUpdate.
Suffice to say I was very frustrated when for 3 hours I'd been trying frantically to solve this problem, only to find it was due to a (silly) copy/paste error - and only to find the error about 3 mins after I'd posted this question!
Hope this helps someone.
I suspect it is because you are calling AddRange(). This will add the new objects to the data context. Instead, you should try just re attaching the existing objects by called Attach() on your data context.
(Or if you never detached them and still have your original data context, you don't need to do anything, just make the changes to the objects and call SubmitChanges())
Related
I like the idea of Records mainly because we can get away from using someObject.get('someKey')
But Record seems to operate more like some kind of template for records.
If you just instantiate Record each time you need a read only immutable object, simply because you like to access properties as someObject.key, would this be a bad idea?
A call to Record returns a traditional JS type (class) when you call it. Ideally you should store this type reference and create new record instances from it. Otherwise stuff like inheritance-check doesn't work as intended.
You should prefer Record over traditional JS objects or Immutable Maps because of the integrity and immutability it offers while retaining the first class member access. However don't create a Record from a Map just for the sake of syntax convenience, you should use Record in place of the said Map everywhere.
Said that, bear in mind that Record has its own baggage of issues. You can read about it in my other post here... https://stackoverflow.com/a/36357288/2790937
This question is related to another question i asked here ( Entity Framework 4.2 - How to realize TPT-Inheritance with Database-generated Primarykey Value? ) and should simply clarify, if my assumptions, regarding the problem stated in the topic, are right or not.
The Problem (in detail):
I want to use EF (4.1) to access a database, that already exists
the database has some restrictions regarding the generation of primary key values for its tables (there is a UDF that takes a tablename and returns the next available ID)
To make things as easy as possible for myself, my first approach was to define database triggers (before insert) that call the ID-generating UDF to set the new ID on inserting a new datarow
Then i set the StoreGeneratedPattern properties of the corresponding entities in the csdl of my EDM to "Identity", so that the newly generated IDs would be set in the entity objects after saving them to the DB
The Result of this was:
When I created a new entity object, added it to the DbContext and called SaveChanges on it, the corresponding datarow was inserted in the database, but the entity was not updated with the new database-generated ID. I realized this when i tried to save more at once, that have associations to each other (parent-child), because the foreignkey properties of the child entities could not be set correctly, since the new ID of the parent was not known to the DbContext.
This is the reason I asked the above mentioned question concerning TPT inheritance.
After several days of research and trying everything that came to my mind to solve this problem, i think i realized, that this simply cannot work. Although the documentation of the StoreGeneratedPattern enum at MSDN and several explanations in blogs suggests, that StoreGeneratedPattern.Identity should be set to retrieve the generated value, when the DB generates a value on inserting a new row, this is not true for primary keys in conjunction with database triggers.
After thinking about that a long time, that seems perfectly logical to me, since the EF needs some criterium to retrieve database-generated values, and i think that would be in most cases the identity of an entity. For databasecolumns that are set to autoincrement (or identity-column, ...) that might be no problem, because the DBMS provides some functionality to retrieve the last inserted identity-value (e.g. ##identity in MSSQL). But when using a trigger to generate a new identity-value, the EF obviously doesnt know how to query the newly inserted row (and i cant imagine any good db-independent way to do this either).
So my actual question is: are the assumptions above correct or am I overlooking something important here?
Thanks in advance for any clarification/inspiration on this.
Edit (followup question):
After reading the answer from Ladislav another question arises:
If I set StoreGeneratedPattern in CSDL, do I have to set it to the same value in SSDL (and vice versa)? The patch for the edm designer implies that this is the case, because it automatically synchronizes the StoreGeneratedPattern in SSDL when you change it in CSDL (through the designer).
The StoreGeneratedPattern.Identity should work. If you set it in EF Designer make sure that it was correctly configured in both SSDL and CSDL parts of EDMX file (open it as XML to check it). There was a bug in EF designer which caused correct setting only in CSDL so SQL part didn't know that new ID must be selected from the database after insert. This bug was in some rare cases solved by installing VS 2010 SP1 and it should be definitely solved by special patch.
I had the same problem: one of the column was set with trigger.
But it appeared that I did have troubles with VS edmx designer ('Identity' hadn't been set), and it helped fix it manually (one model had correct value, but other didn't).
Then we got "Store update, insert, or delete statement affected an unexpected number of rows (0). Entities may have been modified or deleted since entities were loaded. Refresh ObjectStateManager entries". That was easily fixed following instuctions here
If I set StoreGeneratedPattern in CSDL, do I have to set it to the
same value in SSDL (and vice versa)?
Yes, it seems to not work without changes to both CSDL and SSDL
I have a relatively simple Django app, with quite heavy usage that is responsible for quite some concurrency in the db operations.
I have a model Post with a m2m to a Tag model.
A single line in my code, p.add(t) is repeatedly causing mysql exceptions (where p is a Post instance and t is a Tag instance.)
IntegrityError: (1062, "Duplicate entry '329051-1827414' for key 'post_id'")
When this is raised I can manually run this p.add(t) successfully, so it must have to do with some peculiar state that the db/app are in at the time of normal execution. It happens about once every 1000 tag-adding attempts, without any pattern that I can detect (i.e both numbers in the "329051-1827414" pair of the example change)
A CHECK TABLE in mysql on the relevant table shows that they are all seemingly OK.
Any ideas?
Usually you see errors like that when trying to add to an intermediate table if the row being added duplicates the unique-together constraint for the FK's. I'm guessing that in the example you provided "329051" is a Post id and "1827414" is a Tag id.
Normally in Django you can call the add() method repeatedly to add the same instance and Django takes care of everything for you. I'm assuming the model manager maintains some state to help it determine if each add() represents a new or existing row and if the row appears to be new it attempts an insert.
That in itself doesn't explain why you're getting the error. You mention "is responsible for quite some concurrency in the db operations.". Without knowing what that means, I'm guessing that you could be getting a race condition where multiple thread/processes are attempting to add the same new tag around the same time and both are attempting inserts.
I think I'm seeing a similar problem in my app - If I send two identical requests to add a m2m relation (e.g. tag in my case as well), I get that error because the m2m table has a unique constraint on (user, tag). I'm guessing the server is processing the .add functions at the same time.
if not already in database:
# Both invocations reach here because the next line takes some time to process.
create m2m row
I don't know how that can be remedied.
I have a table Users and a table Items
In the Items table, I have fields such as
ModifiedBy
CreatedBy
AssignedTo
which all have a userId integer. The database is set up to have these as foreign keys back to the Users table.
When using LINQToSQL, the relationships which are automatically built from the dbml end up giving me names like User, User1 and User2
e.g. myItem.User1.Name or myItem.User2.Name
Obviously this isn't very readable and I'd like it be along the lines of
myItem.CreatedByUser.Name or myItem.ModifiedByUser.Name etc
I could change the names of the relationships but that means I have to redo that every time I change the db schema and refresh the dbml.
Is there any way round this?
The simple answer: No.
Someone has suggested the idea of creating partial Association classes where the property names get defined, but that won't work either: Renaming LINQ 2 SQL Entity Properties Through Partial Classes.
Your choice is to either spend a little time learning more about LINQ-to-SQL "behind-the-scenes" so that you can manually make the necessary modifications or to just change the property names through the Properties window. Personally, I just delete/redrag/rename, because not setting a property correctly is a pain to debug because the exceptions that get thrown give you little to no clue as to what caused it. I even went so far as to create a unit test library that takes each MetaTable object in the model and verifies the field count, the ServerDataType contents of each field, the association count, the names of each association, and the names of each end of the association. Every few changes, I run the unit tests to make sure that the model is intact.
Firstly, no... the names are created based on the second table in the relationship.
But what you should know is that you don't have to "refresh" (meaning, delete the table in the DBML then re-drag-and-drop it).
For the project I'm working on, we have over 200 tables... about 50 of which we have manually tweaked after dragging them from the database. We never delete and re-drag tables as there have been so many changes post-auto-generation.
I just add a small partial class to extend the object with suitably named properties, example below:
namespace Database.TableModels {
partial class WTSR_Induction {
public EmailTemplate ConfirmationEmailTemplate {
get { return EmailTemplate1; }
}
public EmailTemplate InviteEmailTemplate {
get { return EmailTemplate; }
}
}
}
In this example, the WTSR_Inductions table has two links to the EmailTemplates table, hence the EmailTemplate and EmailTemplate1 properties.
A bit late but you can do this by selecting the relationship on the linq model and go to properties and update the parent property name.
You could use linq to sql without the dbml it may be extra work upfront but from the perspective of a change to a table column name it may be easier than changes to the dbml as you have described.
I suggest creating extension methods mapping the names you want to the names you get from the autogenerated code. That way after each auto-generation you don't have to change the autogenerated code, but only your own extension methods. That, plus the unit tests to do sanity checks as suggested elsewhere on this page should work fine.
I have just faced this problem myself and I'm off to try to implement my own suggestion.
EDIT: This seems relevant:
SQLMetal Multiple Foreign Keys Pointing to One Table Issue
I am trying to inherit from my generated datacontext in LinqToSQL - something like this
public class myContext : dbDataContext {
public System.Data.Linq.Table<User>() Users {
return (from x in base.Users() where x.DeletedOn.HasValue == false select x);
}
}
But my Linq statement returns IQueryable which cannot cast to Table - does anyone know a way to limit the contents of a Linq.Table - I am trying to be certain that anywhere my Users table is accessed, it doesn't return those marked deleted. Perhaps I am going about this all wrong - any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Hal
Another approach would to be use views..
CREATE VIEW ActiveUsers as SELECT * FROM Users WHERE IsDeleted = 0
As far as linq to sql is concerned, that is just the same as a table. For any table that you needed the DeletedOn filtering, just create a view that uses the filter and use that in place of the table in your data context.
You could use discriminator column inheritance on the table, ie. a DeletedUsers table and ActiveUsers table where the discriminator column says which goes to which. Then in your code, just reference the Users.OfType ActiveUsers, which will never include anything deleted.
As a side note, how the heck do you do this with markdown?
Users.OfType<ActiveUsers>
I can get it in code, but not inline
Encapsulate your DataContext so that developers don't use Table in their queries. I have an 'All' property on my repositories that does a similar filtering to what you need. So then queries are like:
from item in All
where ...
select item
and all might be:
public IQueryable<T> All
{
get { return MyDataContext.GetTable<T>.Where(entity => !entity.DeletedOn.HasValue); }
}
You can use a stored procedure that returns all the mapped columns in the table for all the records that are not marked deleted, then map the LINQ to SQL class to the stored procedure's results. I think you just drag-drop the stored proc in Server Explorer on to the class in the LINQ to SQL designer.
What I did in this circumstance is I created a repository class that passes back IQueryable but basically is just
from t in _db.Table
select t;
this is usually referenced by tableRepository.GetAllXXX(); but you could have a tableRepository.GetAllNonDeletedXXX(); that puts in that preliminary where clause to take out the deleted rows. This would allow you to get back the deleted ones, the undeleted ones and all rows using different methods.
Perhaps my comment to Keven sheffield's response may shed some light on what I am trying to accomplish:
I have a similar repository for most
of my data access, but I am trying to
be able to traverse my relationships
and maintain the DeletedOn logic,
without actually calling any
additional methods. The objects are
interrogated (spelling fixed) by a StringTemplate
processor which can't call methods
(just props/fields).
I will ultimately need this DeletedOn filtering for all of the tables in my application. The inherited class solution from Scott Nichols should work (although I will need to derive a class and relationships for around 30 tables - ouch), although I need to figure out how to check for a null value in my Derived Class Discriminator Value property.
I may just end up extended all my classes specifically for the StringTemplate processing, explicitly adding properties for the relationships I need, I would just love to be able to throw StringTemplate a [user] and have it walk through everything.
There are a couple of views we use in associations and they still appear just like any other relationship. We did need to add the associations manually. The only thing I can think to suggest is to take a look at the properties and decorated attributes generated for those classes and associations.
Add a couple tables that have the same relationship and compare those to the view that isn't showing up.
Also, sometimes the refresh on the server explorer connection doesn't seem to work correctly and the entities aren't created correctly initially, unless we remove them from the designer, close the project, then reopen the project and add them again from the server explorer. This is assuming you are using Visual Studio 2008 with the linq to sql .dbml designer.
I found the problem that I had with the relationships/associations not showing in the views. It seems that you have to go through each class in the dbml and set a primary key for views as it is unable to extract that information from the schema. I am in the process of setting the primary keys now and am planning to go the view route to isolate only non-deleted items.
Thanks and I will update more later.