I’m working with LINQ to SQL and calling stored procedures from my application. The problem I’m running into is with the automatically generated result classes. When my stored procedure returns char(1) columns from the database, the generated class properties are created as char data types in C#. This is causing some issues in my code because I would prefer to work with string properties instead of char properties. Is there a straightforward method to modify this behavior so that char(1) database columns get mapped to string properties in the generated result classes? I’ve been looking through the settings but haven’t found an obvious solution yet.
You can override the default mapping behavior by modifying the DBML file directly in the designer. Open your DBML file, locate the result class for your stored procedure, and find the problematic char(1) properties. Change the Type attribute from “System.Char” to “System.String” and set the DbType from “Char(1)” to “VarChar(1)”. This approach persists through regeneration cycles unlike editing the designer code file. Alternatively, consider creating a partial class extension for your result class with computed string properties that convert the char values, which provides a cleaner separation and won’t be affected by designer updates.
hmm thats interesting - have you tried manually editing the designer file after generation? i know it gets overwritten but curious if that even works temporarily. also wondering what specific issues youre running into with char vs string - are you doing comparisons or concatenation that’s breaking?
another option is to use a wrapper class or dto that maps the char fields to strings during the conversion. less invasive than modifying dbml files and you dont have to worry about regeneration overwriting your changes.