Question

I want to apply a timestamp to my Entity Framework project. I have a class listed below. I hoped that this class would grab the current DateTime. But instead it provides me a field to enter my datetime. I want this to grab the current datetime.

 public class Answer
    {
        public int ID { get; set; }
        public string Answers {get; set;}
        public System.DateTime DateCreated { get; set; }
        public string Division { get; set; }
        public string Phone { get; set; }
        public string Description { get; set; }



    }

Below is the line of code that i know is wrong.

public System.DateTime DateCreated { get; set; }

i am a little unsure of how to go about this. I am new to entity and new to MVC. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

You could initialize it in the constructor e.g.

public class Answer
{
    public Answer()
    {
        DateCreated = DateTime.UtcNow;
    }

    ...
}

However, I get the impression that your Answer class isn’t actually an entity but a view model. For actual entities, what I tend to do with fixed/generated values like this is let the database populate the field with a default value e.g. GetUtcDate() and then in the EF designer set the StoreGeneratedPattern property to Computed – that way when you pull down your entities the CreatedDate will be pre-populated. This gives you data integrity both ways as you won’t be able to overwrite the field in the database either when pushing your data back up.

Then it’s just a case of mapping your Answer entity to your Answer view model therefore nothing has to be initialized.