Entity Framework and Sql Server view question

Question

Hi to all,

For several reasons that I don't have the liberty to talk about, we are defining a view on our Sql Server 2005 database like so:

CREATE VIEW [dbo].[MeterProvingStatisticsPoint]
AS
SELECT
    CAST(0 AS BIGINT) AS 'RowNumber',
    CAST(0 AS BIGINT) AS 'ProverTicketId',
    CAST(0 AS INT) AS 'ReportNumber',
    GETDATE() AS 'CompletedDateTime',
    CAST(1.1 AS float) AS 'MeterFactor',
    CAST(1.1 AS float) AS 'Density',
    CAST(1.1 AS float) AS 'FlowRate',
    CAST(1.1 AS float) AS 'Average',
    CAST(1.1 AS float) AS 'StandardDeviation',
    CAST(1.1 AS float) AS 'MeanPlus2XStandardDeviation',
    CAST(1.1 AS float) AS 'MeanMinus2XStandardDeviation'
WHERE 0 = 1

The idea is that the Entity Framework will create an entity based on this query, which it does, but it generates it with an error that states the following:

"warning 6002: The table/view 'Keystone_Local.dbo.MeterProvingStatisticsPoint' does not have a primary key defined. The key has been inferred and the definition was created as a read-only table/view."

And it decides that the CompletedDateTime field will be this entity primary key.

We are using EdmGen to generate the model. Is there a way not to have the entity framework include any field of this view as a primary key?

Thanks for help.

Answer 1

Looks like it is a known problem with EdmGen: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/forums/en-US/adodotnetentityframework/thread/12aaac4d-2be8-44f3-9448-d7c659585945/

Answer 2

The current Entity Framework EDM generator will create a composite key from all non-nullable fields in your view. In order to gain control over this, you will need to modify the view and underlying table columns setting the columns to nullable when you do not want them to be part of the primary key. The opposite is also true, as I encountered, the EDM generated key was causing data-duplication issues, so I had to define a nullable column as non-nullable to force the composite key in the EDM to include that column.

Answer 3

To get a view I had to only show one primary key column I created a second view that pointed to the first and used NULLIF to make the types nullable. This worked for me to make the EF think there was just a single primary key in the view.

Not sure if this will help you though since I don't believe the EF will accept an entity with NO primary key.

Answer 4

We had the same problem and this is the solution:

To force entity framework to use a column as a primary key, use ISNULL.

To force entity framework not to use a column as a primary key, use NULLIF.

An easy way to apply this is to wrap the select statement of your view in another select.

Example:

SELECT
  ISNULL(MyPrimaryID,-999) MyPrimaryID,
  NULLIF(AnotherProperty,'') AnotherProperty
  FROM ( ... ) AS temp