EF 5 Model First Partial Class Custom Constructor How To?

Question

EF has generated for me some partial classes, each with a constructor, but it says not to touch them (example below), now if I make my own secondary partial class and I want

Answer 1

If I well understand the question, you need this constructor when creating a new entity, that is an entity that was not persisted before.

My case was to set a default value to all datetime, that is initalize them to "the begining of time" : 1900-01-01.

In this case I use an entity factory

public static T GetNewEntity () {
    T e;
    try {
        e = Activator.CreateInstance();
    } catch {
        e = default(T);
    }
    SetDefaults(e);

    return e;
}

Each time I need a new Entity I use

Entity e = GetNewEntity();

with SetDefaults as :

public static void SetDefaults (object o) {
    Type T = o.GetType();
    foreach ( MemberInfo m in T.GetProperties() ) {
        PropertyInfo P = T.GetProperty(m.Name);
        switch ( Type.GetTypeCode(P.PropertyType) ) {
            case TypeCode.String :
                if ( P.GetValue(o, null) == null ) 
                    P.SetValue(o, String.Empty, null); 
                break;
            case TypeCode.DateTime :
                if ( (DateTime)P.GetValue(o, null) == DateTime.MinValue )
                    P.SetValue(o, EntityTools.dtDef, null); 
                break;
        }
    }
}

full code is here

It could be rewrittent to consider the entity type and so on...