Question

I have the following model entity:

public class ScheduledTask
    {
        public virtual int ScheduledTaskId { get; set; }    
        public virtual Incident TemplateIncident { get; set; }
        //Some props are omitted for simplicity    
        [Display(Name = "Next runtime")]
        [Required]
        [DataType(DataType.DateTime)]
        public virtual DateTime NextExecuteAfterDate { get; set; }
    }

It is a part of a DataContext as:

public DbSet<ScheduledTask> ScheduledTasks { get; set; }

A UI in a solution is an MVC3 site.

Whenever a user is saving a record, a schedulable task is being saved along:

_db.Add(new ScheduledTask
                        {
                            NextExecuteAfterDate = DateTime.MinValue,
                            Schedule = scheduleTypeId,
                            TemplateIncident = incident
                        });
            _db.SaveChanges();

As you can see, I am creating an instance of my entity class, assigning a DateTime property a minimum value and adding it to a DbContext. Then I call SaveChanges().

SaveChages() generates an

[SqlException (0x80131904): The conversion of a datetime2 data type to a datetime data type resulted in an out-of-range value.
The statement has been terminated.]

A NextExecuteAfterDate in a database is a Column of a type datetime, not null.

Where does datetime2 come from, and how can I fix the problem and get EF to add a row to a table?

Answer 1

the sql server wants to store 1.1.0001 in the database, but thats not in the range of the SQL Server DateTimes.
i haven’t worked with EF that much but in other ORMs you can simply change the DateTime to Nullable and store a null value explicitly.
like this:

public class ScheduledTask
{
    public virtual int ScheduledTaskId { get; set; }    
    public virtual Incident TemplateIncident { get; set; }
    //Some props are omitted for simplicity    
    [Display(Name = "Next runtime")]
    [DataType(DataType.DateTime)]
    public virtual DateTime? NextExecuteAfterDate { get; set; }
}

maybe this works with EF too