I'm faced with a confusing problem where in my Edit or Create action result methods, EF4 will throw a DbEntityValidationException with the inner message stating:
The field Body must be a string or array type with a maximum length of '128'.
The model in question looks like this:
[Table("tblArticles")]
public class Article
{
[Key]
public int ID { get; set; }
[Required(ErrorMessage="Title must be included")]
public string Title { get; set; }
[AllowHtml]
public string Body { get; set; }
[Required(ErrorMessage="Start Date must be specified")]
[Display(Name="Start Date")]
[DisplayFormat(DataFormatString="dd-mm-yyyy")]
public DateTime? StartDate { get; set; }
[Required(ErrorMessage = "End Date must be specified")]
[Display(Name = "End Date")]
public DateTime? EndDate { get; set; }
public int Priority { get; set; }
public bool Archived { get; set; }
public virtual ICollection<ArticleImage> Images { get; set; }
}
The "Body" field in the actual database is of type Text, so there's no obvious limit there. The data that I'm trying to post is this:
<p> This is an example to confirm that new articles are looking right.</p> <p> <img alt="" src="http://www.google.co.nz/logos/2011/houdini11-sr.jpg" style="width: 160px; height: 56px; float: left;" /></p>
An example of the Edit method looks like this:
[HttpPost]
public ActionResult Edit(Article article)
{
if (ModelState.IsValid)
{
try
{
articleRepository.Update(article);
}
catch (DbEntityValidationException dbevEx)
{
ErrorSignal.FromCurrentContext().Raise(dbevEx);
ModelState.AddModelError("FORM", dbevEx);
return View("Edit", article);
}
// Other exception handling happens...
}
return RedirectToAction("Index");
}
And finally, the method that actually does the grunt work is:
public void Update(T Entity)
{
dbset.Attach(Entity);
db.Entry(Entity).State = System.Data.EntityState.Modified;
db.Commit();
}
I can't see anything in code or in the database that might be causing the problem, so where else should I look?
Default length of string field in code first is 128. If you are using EF validation it will throw exception. You can extend the size by using:
[StringLength(Int32.MaxValue)]
public string Body { get; set; }
This post became somehow popular so I'm adding second approach which also works:
[MaxLength]
public string Body { get; set; }
StringLengthAttribute
is from System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations assembly and MaxLengthAttribute
is from EntityFramework assembly (EF 4.1).