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There might be some nuance to this question since previous questions describe a similar problem, but their suggestions don't seem to work in our project. The project uses Entity Framework 6.1 and a database first design pattern and the T4 code generation strategy. We have a number of views that generate calculated values that we know will always have a default value, but Entity Framework keeps changing the properties to Nullable manually updating the properties works, but as soon as the EDMX is updated it reverts back to Nullable.

Is there a way to force Entity Framework to not default to Nullable properties? Ideally this is a pattern we can keep following since we use a number of views and constantly needing to update properties is quite tedious.

rjzii
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1 Answers1

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The answer is to ensure that the view reports as being not null from SQL Server at which point Entity Framework will not default to Nullable. This can be done by forcing the view column to be not null. Briefly,

SELECT CASE Status WHEN 3 THEN 1 ELSE 0 END AS HasStatus  
FROM dbo.Product

Will map the HasStatus column to int, null. However,

SELECT ISNULL(CAST(CASE Status WHEN 3 THEN 1 ELSE 0 END), 0) AS HasStatus  
FROM dbo.Product

Will map the HasStatus column to int, not null.

rjzii
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  • Entity Framework (v6.4) recognized the proprietary T-SQL `ISNULL()` function as returning a non-nullable value but had a bug that failed to recognize it when the ANSI standard `COALESCE()` function is used. This caused many wasted days to figure out. – Suncat2000 May 19 '21 at 13:42