Any clever way to fix 'string or binary data would be truncated' warning with LINQ

10
votes

Is there a clever way to determine which field is causing 'string or binary data would be truncated' with LINQ.

I've always ended up doing it manually by stepping through a debugger, but with a batch using 'SubmitChanges' I have to change my code to inserting a single row to find the culprit in a batch of rows.

Am I missing something or in this day and age do I really have to still use a brute force method to find the problem.

Please dont give me advice on avoiding this error in future (unless its something much cleverer than 'validate your data'). The source data is coming from a different system where I dont have full control anyway - plus I want to be lazy.

PS. Does SQL Server 2008 actually tell me the field name. Please tell me it does! I'll upgrade!

4
.netsql-serverlinq-to-sql
just for fun: turned out to be a company name of 'Embassy of the Dominican Republic in the United States' trying to fit into a 50 character company name field – Simon_Weaver
Looks like this doesn't work for the entity framework. Hope they get that fixed soon. – Paul Keister
Recently noticed the field name AND bad data is now included in the error message. Not sure exactly when they added it. We're using SQL Azure with the latest compatibility level. – Simon_Weaver

4 Answers

5
votes

Fire up SQL Profiler. The last query from your application should be the one that is failing.

1
votes

Seems like they fixed this problem for the Service Pack 1 of .NET 3.5, as noted in this link: http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=353232

Might want to check it out yourself.

0
votes

It would probably be useful to re-post/edit this tagged as linq .net

DJ - where are you getting this data you post as a proposed solution ?

The exception doesn't contain this information, so your post is pretty much useless - unless you can specify the source.

-2
votes

Assuming you are processing a large batch of records and you don't want to (can't) validate the data before hand and you just want db constraints to catch any errors?

Change your program to catch the exception and print out the current record details to a log file or something.

Record # 9999
Caused "string or binary data would be truncated" error
Field1: "Data" Length: 55
Field2: 9999
etc.