Question

The admins for my application can make extra properties for the userprofiles. So UserA can have 1 Cellphone number , while UserB can have 5. Or UserA can have a Creditcard number while UserB doesn’t have any.

I want to make this work with Azure Table Storage. I’m making generic entities and inserting them into Table Storage.

I know every entity/row can only have 255 filled in properties ( Partition Key, Row Key, Timestamp and your own properties.) In my situation there is a high chance there will be more columns but a very very small chance 1 user will actually use 255 properties.

Now here is the problem, when the user reads his entity all the other properties that he doesn’t use will be 'm:null="true'.

As you can see he still takes the extra properties he doesn’t need.
I can of course ignore them in my ReadingEntity Event but it’s still overhead right? Imagine you want to get the profiles of 100 users and you have like 500 columns. There will be a lot of useless data in that xml file & network traffic.

Is there any way to ignore those null and don’t send them back at all? Instead of sending them back and marking the column as null?

Answer 1

And are you using development storage? Make sure to try this against
real cloud storage… dev storage saves an actual schema and may be
applying properties from other entities to the one you’re trying to
read.
– smarx Jul 5 at 17:28

This was the solution