c# - Is there an easy way to make EntityFramework use SQL default values?

Question

For example, most of my entities have DateCreated and DateModified fields. The defaults to these are set to GetUtcDate() in SQL Server.

If I try and create an entity and don't set these values, I get an exception saying it can't run the SQL insert because the date value is out of range. Makes sense because C# default dates are 1/1/0001 while SQL Server's minimum date is 1/1/1753.

So is there a way I can tell EF to either use the SQL Server default values, or to NOT try and insert columns which have not been set?

Answer 1

You must set StoreGeneratedPattern for those properties to Identity for DateCreated and Computed for DataModified. It is available in designer. Once you do that you cannot modify those values in your application - only database can set those properties. I wrote about this some article because this feature had bug before VS2010 SP1 but there are reports that it still doesn't work sometimes.