Question

I am having problems with (2) fields when saving entities in my ASP.NET MVC4 application:

• email
• phone

As you know, these fields will have special characters @ and - typically. Here is my code from the controller using ValueInjecter to inject my model classes from the hydrated object via Model Binding:

public ActionResult Create(TestViewModel testViewModel)
{
  using (var context = new MyEntities())
  {
    var person = new Person();
    person.InjectFrom(testViewModel);
    context.Person.AddObject(person);
    context.SaveChanges();
  }
}

The error I am getting is the following:

“String or binary data would be truncated. The statement has been
terminated”

Ok on 1st glance you might say it’s the size of the field in SQL, but the true issue is masqueraded because of those special charachters. If I enter the following for the fields:

phone: 11234565454514564561
email: blahblahblahblah

…then everything works.

However if I enter:

phone: [phone]
email: [e-mail]

I get the error about the “String or binary data would be truncated”. So I found a work-around but this seems completly unnecessary and probably the wrong way. If I explicitly map the values from the model bound object to the entity, using the C# escape characters, then my values will insert as shown below:

public ActionResult Create(TestViewModel testViewModel)
{
  using (var context = new MyEntities())
  {
    var person = new Person();
    person.InjectFrom(testViewModel);

    //Explicitly map items preserving special charachters
    person.EmailAddress = @testViewModel.EmailAddress;
    person.Phone = @testViewModel.Phone;

    context.Person.AddObject(person);
    context.SaveChanges();
  }
}

OK, so honestly I don’t know where the culprit lies. Is this a MVC model binding issue, an Entity Framework issue, a C# deal, or ValueInjecter? I tried using annotations on my ViewModel properties to dictate the data types like Phone and Email but that didn’t stop the issue. Only by being explicit in code by escaping those characters was a way to do it.

What am I doing incorrectly because I know fields like email and phone with special characters are saved off all the time to EF with MVC? What can I do to prevent having to sprinkle in those lines of code every time I have a value with a special character?

Thanks!!

Answer 1

Well in typical fasion I figure it out 10 seconds after posting the question that I have spent 3 hours trying to figure out:

As @CodeMaster noted, those lines of code were incorrect anyway. I started playing with some of the other fields and I figured out the culprit.

The code smaple I gave was condensed for brevity, but I was injecting into (2) different entites: Person and Contact. It turns out both tables have a ‘Title’ field. I was only focused on the ‘Title’ field in the Person table which had a length of ’50’ like below:

<Property Name="Title" Type="nvarchar" Nullable="false" MaxLength="50" />

It turns out the Contact field had the exact smae field I was unaware of but only a length of ‘8’ as below:

<Property Name="Title" Type="nvarchar" MaxLength="8" />

This caused the error and it was indeed legitimate. ValueInjecter mapped the same single ‘Title’ value to both entities when I only wanted the one and caused the issue. Have to be careful because ValueInjectoer does not discriminate if names match (as it should not) but this cause my problem.