Question

I have a view which I want to display, for which I have a controller which accepts a string (StudentID). Here is my controller action:

public ActionResult ShowStudent(string StudentID)
{
    ViewData.Model = student.vwStudent.Where(s => s.StudentID == StudentID);
    return View();
}

Now here, StudentId’s have leading zeros in them. e.g. 00003345, 000000223 etc.
Hence, to display the view for a particular student, I have to enter the exact string “00003345” in the url: “http://Students/ShowStudent/00003345” I want to be able to display the view even if I enter “3345” in the url: “http://Students/ShowStudent/3345” but I get an error.

I have tried passing a Long(Int64) parameter instead of a string and converting StudentID to String in ViewData.Model like:

ViewData.Model = student.vwStudent.Where(s => s.StudentID == StudentID.ToString());

But I get an error:

LINQ to Entities does not recognize the method ‘System.String ToString()’ method, and this method cannot be translated into a store expression.

EDIT:
What is wrong with just parsing it to an Int64 like this:

ViewData.Model = student.vwStudent.Where(s => Int64.Parse(s.StudentID) == Int64.Parse(StudentID));

Answer 1

Thanks all for the help, I took a bit of all of your advices and came to a solution that works for me.

I Was able to resolve this by Casting in my SQL:

CAST(CAST(StudentID AS bigint) AS nvarchar(33)) AS StudentID 

And then converting it in my Controller:

var StudentID = Convert.ToString(Int64.Parse(StudentId));

ViewData.Model = student.vwStudent.Where(a => a.StudentID == StudentId);