How to inspect EF model metadata at runtime?

Question

I need to do some trimming before saving various fields in our database. We\'re deserializing xml from another application into EF entities and then inserting them. There ar

Answer 1

You can find the properties by this piece of code:

var varchars = context.MetadataWorkspace.GetItemCollection(DataSpace.CSpace)
    .Where(gi => gi.BuiltInTypeKind == BuiltInTypeKind.EntityType)
    .Cast<EntityType>()
    .SelectMany(entityType => entityType.Properties
        .Where(edmProperty => edmProperty.TypeUsage.EdmType.Name == "String")
        .Where(edmProperty => (int)(edmProperty.TypeUsage.Facets["MaxLength"]
            .Value) >= 4000))
    .ToList();

The trick is to extract the entity types from the model by BuiltInTypeKind.EntityType and cast these to EntityType to get access to the Properties. An EdmProperty has a property DeclaringType which shows to which entity they belong.