How to determine which entity failed on SaveChanges

Question

I have a number of pending changes in my object context when I call SaveChanges. Somewhere in there is an entity with a value for a column that is too long. This results in SqlException: String or binary data would be truncated.

The question is how do I determine offending entity/column?

Answer 1

SQL Profiler.

Answer 2

You could consider using DataAnnotations and building your Buddy Classes for validation. Then you display a friendly validation errors to your user if their data is incorrect.

Imports System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations 

Namespace Domain 
#Region "Validation" 

<MetadataType(GetType(UserMetaData))> _ 
Partial Public Class User 
End Class 


''' <summary> 
''' Validation for all User data. 
''' </summary> 
''' <remarks>All validation is done at the Service Layer</remarks> 
Public Class UserMetaData 

    <DisplayName("name")> _ 
    <Required(ErrorMessage:="Username is required.")> _ 
    <StringLength(30, ErrorMessage:="Username cannot exceed 30 characters.")> _ 
    <RegularExpression("^\w{3,30}$", ErrorMessage:="Not a valid username.")> _ 
    Public Property UserName As String 

    <DisplayName("email")> _ 
    <StringLength(50, ErrorMessage:="Email Address cannot exceed 50 characters.")> _ 
    <RegularExpression("^([a-zA-Z0-9_\-\.]+)@((\[[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}\.)|(([a-zA-Z0-9\-]+\.)+))([a-zA-Z]{2,4}|[0-9]{1,3})$", ErrorMessage:="Not a valid email address.")> _ 
    Public Property Email As String 

    <DisplayName("website")> _ 
    <StringLength(256, ErrorMessage:="Web Address cannot exceed 256 characters.")> _ 
    <RegularExpression("^http(s?)\://[a-zA-Z0-9\-\.]+\.[a-zA-Z]{2,3}(/\S*)?$", ErrorMessage:="Not a valid website address.")> _ 
    Public Property WebSite As String 

    <DisplayName("about")> _ 
    <StringLength(2000, ErrorMessage:="Profile cannot exceed 2000 characters.")> _ 
    Public Property About As String 

    <DisplayName("region")> _ 
    <Required(ErrorMessage:="Region is required.")> _ 
    Public Property UserRegion As Integer 

    <DisplayName("birthdate")> _ 
    <DisplayFormat(ApplyFormatInEditMode:=True, ConvertEmptyStringToNull:=True, DataFormatString:="{0:MM/dd/yyyy}")> _ 
    Public Property BirthDate As DateTime 

End Class 
#End Region 
End Namespace

More references

http://adventuresdotnet.blogspot.com/2009/08/aspnet-webforms-validation-with-data.html
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jimoneil/archive/2008/07/08/dynamic-data-annotations.aspx
http://www.ipreferjim.com/site/2010/05/system-componentmodel-dataannotations-for-asp-net-web-forms/