How to configure ProviderManifestToken for EF Code First

Question

I have a asp.net MVC3 project using EF code-first. For my unit testing I have been using SQL Server CE 4.0 and SQL Server 2008 Express. Both have worked perfectly with EF ge

Answer 1

After hours of searching & fiddling, I found a way to do it. Turns out the DbModelBuilder class takes a DbProviderInfo in its Build method, so I use that instead of relying on EF to call OnModelCreated:

// 'Entities' is my DbContext subclass, the "container" in EF terms.
public static Entities GetNewContext()
{
    // Get a connection, for example:
    var connection = new SqlConnection(GetConnectionString());

    // Create a DbModelBuilder
    var modelBuilder = new DbModelBuilder();
    // Configure the model builder.
    // I changed my DbContext subclass - added a public version of OnModelCreated and called it ConfigureModelBuilder
    Entities.ConfigureModelBuilder(modelBuilder);

    // Here's where the magic happens.
    // Build the model and pass the ProviderManifestToken (I use 2005 to avoid a bug in precision of sql datetime columns when using concurrency control)
    var model = modelBuilder.Build(new System.Data.Entity.Infrastructure.DbProviderInfo("System.Data.SqlClient", "2005"));
    // Compile the model
    var compiledModel = model.Compile();

    // Create the container (DbContext subclass). Ideally all the previous stuff should be cached.
    return new Entities(connection, compiledModel, true);
}

Obviously this needs some reorganization (e.g. cache the compiled model so you don't need to re-build it every time a context is created).

For me this completely solved the problem. Enjoy!