Allow Entity Framework 4.5 To Use Datetime2 With Sql Server Ce4

I am working on an Entity Framework project using SQL Server 2008. We recently changed to use the datetime2 field type for a lot of our Dates as we need the precision. This works

Solution 1:

You may be better off using SQL Server 2012 LocalDB rather than CE. I realize that using SQL Server 2012 may introduce potential compatibility issues (though it really shouldn't), but LocalDB is a full SQL-Server functionality file-based database. It supports datetime2

Solution 2:

In the end I found a solution to this problem that works sufficiently for the end-to-end testing configuration I am working with. The solution I went for was to use a special DataContext to handle Sql Server CE requests, thus:

public class TestDataContext : DataContext 
{

    protected override void  OnModelCreating(System.Data.Entity.DbModelBuilder modelBuilder)
    {
        // list of available Conventions: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.data.entity.modelconfiguration.conventions(v=vs.103).aspx // Remove the column attributes that cause the datetime2 errors, so that // for SQL Server CE we just have regular DateTime objects rather than using// the attribute value from the entity.
        modelBuilder.Conventions.Remove<ColumnAttributeConvention>();

        // Attempt to add back the String Length restrictions on the entities. I havent // tested that this works.
        modelBuilder.Configurations.Add( new ComplexTypeConfiguration<StringLengthAttributeConvention>());

        // SQL Server CE is very sensitive to potential circular cascade deletion problems
        modelBuilder.Conventions.Remove<ManyToManyCascadeDeleteConvention>();
        modelBuilder.Conventions.Remove<OneToManyCascadeDeleteConvention>();

    }

}

By replacing the regular DataContext with a TestDataContext in my test classes I have the same behaviour without SQL Server CE crashing out.