Invalid Column Name : SQL / ASP.NET - asp.net

I'm having a hard time debugging a particular problem and have a couple questions. First, here is what's going on:
I have a relatively simple table called Employees, which has a primary key / identity Id. There is also a Username column - which is a GUID foreign key to my aspnet_Users table used for membership. Finally, there is another foreign key Team_Id which points to another table, Teams.
All I'm really trying to do is give a selected employee's Id and pass it to a method in the DAL which then finds the employee with the following statement:
var employee = entities.Employees.Where(emp => emp.Id == employeeId);
Once the employee is retrieved, I want to use another value which is passed to the same method - the selected team's Id - to update the employee's Team_Id value (which team they are assigned to), using the following:
employee.First().Team_Id = teamId;
entities.SaveChanges();
I get the exception
Invalid column name: {Name}
which doesn't make sense to me, because Employee doesn't have a name column.
All of that said, my questions are:
Where could the mix up possibly be coming from? I've tried thinking up a way to step through the code, but it seems like the error is somewhere in the query itself so I'm not really sure how to trace the execution of the query itself.
Is it possible that it may have something to do with my generated Entities? I noticed that when I type employee.First(). Name comes up in Intellisense. I'm really confused by that, since as I've mentioned there is no Name column in the employees table.

Fixed the issue. I just removed the existing Entity Framework Model and re-added it.

As far as the query goes, you can always use SQL Profiler to watch what scripts are actually running. That's a good way to troubleshoot generated SQL anyway.
For your property, somehow that did make it to your class, so your data model thinks it's there, for whatever reason. I'd say just go to your data model (you don't mention if this this is EF or LINQ-to-SQL), and you'll see "Name" there. Just remove it, and it will remove it from the class, and from the data access stuff.

Related

Automatically delete not-null constraints on unused columns after migration

I have a model which is used in combination with GORM:
type User struct {
gorm.Model
Name string
Age uint
}
When I now want to exchange the Name field with FirstName and LastName using the GORM Automigrate command I get the following error on the next request:
ERROR: null value in column "name" violates not-null constraint (SQLSTATE 23502)
Obviously, the AutoMigrate does not destroy the Name column in the user table (as stated in the docs), but it also does not destroy the not-null constraint, which makes the table useless after migration.
How can I automatically destroy the not-null constraints on old columns?
It can't be done automatically as far as I can see.
As you note, gorm will not delete old columns in the table so in essence once you delete the field, gorm forgets about the column. What's clear is that at some point you had tagged your Name field with gorm:"not null" or that constraint wouldn't have been put on.
So one way you might reverse that would be to reinstate the old field, but remove the not null tag, and run the migration. That will remove the not null constraint. Then remove the field, and run the migration again. Not automatic by any means.
You might also look at using the migrator to create your own migration script that drops the constraint or even drops the column entirely.
In my humble opinion Gorm's auto-migrations is a feature that for now is only good for quick prototyping. I don't think it can replace a proper migration system in anything more than a toy app; sooner or later you run into these problems that force you to write careful migration scripts yourself. Packages to look at for that include github.com/pressly/goose or github.com/golang-migrate/migrate.

Database schema advice for storing form fields and field values

I've been tasked with creating an application that allows users the ability to enter data into a web form that will be saved and then eventually used to populate pdf form fields.
I'm having trouble trying to think of a good way to store the field values in a database as the forms will be dynamic (based on pdf fields).
In the app itself I will pass data around in a hash table (fieldname, fieldvalue) but I don't know the best way to convert the hash to db values.
I'm using MS SQL server 2000 and asp.net webforms. Has anyone worked on something similar?
Have you considered using a document database here? This is just the sort of problem they solve alot better than traditional RDBMS solutions. Personally, I'm a big fan of RavenDb. Another pretty decent option is CouchDb. I'd avoid MongoDb as it really isn't a safe place for data in it's current implementation.
Even if you can't use a document database, you can make SQL pretend to be one by setting up your tables to have some metadata in traditional columns with a payload field that is serialized XML or json. This will let you search on metadata while staying out of EAV-land. EAV-land is a horrible place to be.
UPDATE
I'm not sure if a good guide exists, but the concept is pretty simple. The basic idea is to break out the parts you want to query on into "normal" columns in a table -- this lets you query in standard manners. When you find the record(s) you want, you can then grab the CLOB and deserialize it as appropriate. In your case you would have a table that looked something like:
SurveyAnswers
Id INT IDENTITY
FormId INT
SubmittedBy VARCHAR(255)
SubmittedAt DATETIME
FormData TEXT
A few protips:
a) use a text based serialization routine. Gives you a fighting chance to fix data errors and really helps debugging.
b) For SQL 2000, you might want to consider breaking the CLOB (TEXT field holding your payload data) into a separate table. Its been a long time since I used SQL 2000, but my recollection is using TEXT columns did bad things to tables.
The solution for what you're describing is called Entity Attribute Value (EAV) and this model can be a royal pain to deal with. So you should limit as much as possible your usage of this.
For example are there fields that are almost always in the forms (First Name, Last Name, Email etc) then you should put them in a table as fields.
The reason for this is because if you don't somebody sooner or later is going to realize that they have these names and emails and ask you to build this query
SELECT
Fname.value fname,
LName.Value lname,
email.Value email,
....
FROM
form f
INNER JOIN formFields fname
ON f.FormId = ff.FormID
and AttributeName = 'fname'
INNER JOIN formFields lname
ON f.FormId = ff.FormID
and AttributeName = 'lname'
INNER JOIN formFields email
ON f.FormId = ff.FormID
and AttributeName = 'email'
....
when you could have written this
SELECT
common.fname,
common.lname,
common.email,
....
FROM
form f
INNER JOIN common c
on f.FormId = c.FormId
Also get off of SQL 2000 as soon as you can because you're going to really miss the UNPIVOT clause
Its also probably not a bad idea to look at previous SO EAV questions to give you an idea of problems that people have encountered in the past
I'd suggest mirroring the same structure:
Form
-----
form_id
User
created
FormField
-------
formField_id
form_id
name
value

insert data from a asp.net form to a sql database with foreign key constraints

i have two tables
asset employee
assetid-pk empid-pk
empid-fk
now, i have a form to populate the asset table but it cant because of the foreign key constraint..
what to do?
thx
Tk
Foreign keys are created for a good reason - to prevent orphan rows at a minimum. Create the corresponding parent and then use the appropriate value as the foreign key value on the child table.
You should think about this update as a series of SQL statements, not just one statement. You'll process the statements in order of dependency, see example.
Asset
PK AssetID
AssetName
FK EmployeeID
etc...
Employee
PK EmployeeID
EmployeeName
etc...
If you want to "add" a new asset, you'll first need to know which employee it will be assigned to. If it will be assigned to a new employee, you'll need to add them first.
Here is an example of adding a asset named 'BOOK' for a new employee named 'Zach'.
DECLARE #EmployeeFK AS INT;
INSERT (EmployeeName) VALUES ('Zach') INTO EMPLOYEE;
SELECT #EmployeeFK = ##IDENTITY;
INSERT (AssetName, EmployeeID) VALUES ('BOOK',#EmployeeFK) INTO ASSET;
The important thing to notice above, is that we grab the new identity (aka: EmployeeID) assigned to 'Zach', so we can use it when we add the new asset.
If I understand you correctly, are you trying to build the data graph locally before persisting to the data? That is, create the parent and child records within the application and persist it all at once?
There are a couple approaches to this. One approach people take is to use GUIDs as the unique identifiers for the data. That way you don't need to get the next ID from the database, you can just create the graph locally and persist the whole thing. There's been a debate on this approach between software and database for a long time, because while it makes a lot of sense in many ways (hit the database less often, maintain relationships before persisting, uniquely identify data across systems) it turns out to be a significant resource hit on the database.
Another approach is to use an ORM that will handle the persistence mapping for you. Something like NHibernate, for example. You would create your parent object and the child objects would just be properties on that. They wouldn't have any concept of foreign keys and IDs and such, they'd just be objects in code related by being set as properties on each other (such as a "blog post" object with a generic collection of "comment" objects, etc.). This graph would be handed off to the ORM which would use its knowledge of the mapping between the objects and the persistence to send it off to the database in the correct order, perhaps giving back the same object but with ID numbers populated.
Or is this not what you're asking? It's a little unclear, to be honest.

Cannot insert null where field is Guid (object in SqlDataSource)

I have a table which links to another table in the ASP.NET membership schema.
Problem is, all the PKs for the ASP.NET tables are uniqueidentifier so mine has to be too. When I add a SqlDatasource and call its Insert() method, I get the following error:
Cannot insert the value NULL into column 'DiscountCode', table 'CreamDb.dbo.CustomInfo1'; column does not allow nulls. INSERT fails.
The statement has been terminated.
The uniqueidentifier is also treated as an object (its data type), but there is no Guid data type. I had this problem before, but the schema was much simpler so I could fix it.
How can I go about fixing this? If I get rid of the data type part in the markup (so just leave the field/parameter name but not the data type stuff), I get another error so that is not possible.
Thanks
What do you mean by "there is no Guid data type"? What's wrong with System.Guid? Can't you just use Guid.NewGuid(), set the field appropriately, and do the insert?
EDIT: Just to give a bit more meat: attach an event handler to the Inserting event, and populate the field then, via the DbCommand returned by SqlDataSourceCommandEventArgs.Command. Or change the SQL used by the INSERT command to ask the database to populate the GUID field for you.
A popullar approach when dealing with references to the ASP.NET Membership Provider's data is, instead of keeping a proper foreign key to the GUIDs, instead store something like the LoweredUserName in your table. Then, use the Membership Provider's API to interact with the object you need. In some cases, you need an ObjectDataSource abstraction layer to accomplish CRUD scenarios.
Set the default value of the column in SQL Sever to "newid()".
Asp.net won't send the value, and the field will get a new guid.

L2Entities, stored procedure and mapping

Finally checked out L2E framework and ran into problems almost instantly.
Yeah, i know... i should read some books before.
Situation:
entity with props -> id and name.
entity is mapped to table, which has id and name columns.
sproc, which returns ONLY id column.
Problem:
ObjectResult<MyProp> result = _container.MyStoredProcedure(uberParameter);
Calling this will cause an error
[guilty method goes here] threw exception:
System.Data.EntityCommandExecutionException: The data reader is incompatible with the specified 'DataBase.MyPropTableObject'. A member of the type, 'name', does not have a corresponding column in the data reader with the same name..
Problem #2:
Can`t "just return" that field, cause that column has XML data type, but sproc uses fancy select statements, which causes:
Msg 421, Level 16, State 1, Line 1
The xml data type cannot be selected as DISTINCT because it is not comparable.
Question:
Is it possible to exclusively turn off mapping for this entity prop only for this one sproc?
Problem 1 is due to the proc not having the columns to populate the entity. You don't really need the proc if you have mapped the table, just select the field you want from it using linq
var result = MyEntities.EntityIMapped.First(r => r.id = uberParameter).Name;
Would give you the value from the Name column of the table for the given id. You don't need to use a stored proc for this.
Problem 2 sounds like it is in the proc, I would think that distinct on an xml data column would give a lot of results, but I'm only guessing as I don't know your solution.
This is not a direct answer for your question but, hopefully it will point you in the right direction.

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