Question

At work we are looking to move to an ORM (still using an access database with ADO!) I started building with entity framework and everything was going smoothly until I separated it off into it’s own .dll (so we could have the website/crm/production/barcoding systems all using the same database logic).

The issue comes with handling the DbEntityValidationExceptions, my initial test code (which worked)

public override int SaveChanges(System.Data.Objects.SaveOptions options)
        {
            try{return base.SaveChanges(options);}
            catch (DbEntityValidationException dbEx)
            {
                foreach (var validationErrors in dbEx.EntityValidationErrors)
                {
                    foreach (var validationError in validationErrors.ValidationErrors)
                    {
                        Trace.TraceInformation("Class: {0}, Property: {1}, Error: {2}",
                            validationErrors.Entry.Entity.GetType().FullName,
                            validationError.PropertyName,
                            validationError.ErrorMessage);
                    }
                }
                //handle here
                throw;
            } 
        }

but this doesn’t get caught now and i’m left handling a generic threadException. Is there any way to access the original data (cast the threadException?) or is there a different approach I should take. I think I just need a push in the right direction and I can figure something out.

Regards, Pete

UPDATE:

Hmm bit of an issue calling the GetValidationErrors. I notice that my database Context has the baseClass of ObjectContext and not DbContext (So I can’t call the ValidateEntity). I’m using Entity Framework 5 with default code generation enabled – using a database first approach if that helps.

Answer 1

check for validation errors before calling SaveChanges. Something like…

var errors = context.GetValidationErrors();
if(errors.Any())
{
   //handle validation errors
}
else
{
    context.SaveChanges();
}

from memory, so the exact syntax may not be correct.