null date issue

All,

I have a field called SynchDate in my Accounts table, which orignally was declared as not nullable.  Once we started working the saves for this table, we realized that the field needed to be nullable.  I tried changing the field to nullable, but the regen did not pick it up, so the declartion in the entity looked like: 

public System.DateTime SynchDate = null; 

Which results in this error:  Cannot convert null to 'System.DateTime' because it is a value type (path)\Entities\AccountsBase.generated.cs 2469 44 (namespace).Entities

I tried adding new nullable fields and those worked just fine.  Ultimately, I had to rename the field from SychDate to CrmSynchDate and it finally worked.  Any thoughts on why this would occur?  Is SynchDate a reserved netTiers/CodeSmith word?

Thanks,

Jesse

no, it's not a reserved word.  It's likely you were just working with a cached schema during the time you were working on the issue. 
http://community.codesmithtools.com/forums/permalink/23674/23679/ShowThread.aspx#23679

Robert,

It defnitely was not a schema cache issue.  I added and subtracted fields which generated correctly while the SynchDate field did not.  I will investigate it some more.

Thanks.

There's a chance it might've been the mapping file as well. It
probably did not update the mapping file rendered to the root of the
project. Try updating that by hand.

On 4/11/07, basolutions wrote:
>
>
> Robert,
>
> It defnitely was not a schema cache issue. I added and subtracted fields
> which generated correctly while the SynchDate field did not. I will
> investigate it some more.
>
> Thanks.
>
>
>

I just ran into this issue as well. Instead of updating the Mapping .config file by hand I renamed it so that I could compare the results if it worked. The update did indeed work and the difference is "System.DateTime?" vs. "System.DateTime"....which makes sense but this begs the question ..Why didn't the Mapping.config file update?

-Ryan

Well, because it would potentially overwrite someone's customization to the mapping file.  It's difficult to allow the flexibility of mapping, and always be able to update changes.  We just haven't gotten to that point yet.

There is a standalone template:
\SchemaMapping\CreateNetTiersSchemaMap.cst  that will recreate the mapping without regenerating the whole thing that you can use to diff the maps and easily update.

What if there was an attribute added to elements that the user has hand modified.

  <Column Id="DueDate" CSType="System.DateTime?" PropertyName="DueDate" FieldName="dueDate" FriendlyName="Due Date" IncludeInOutput="true" Modified=True/>

It seems like something like this could alleviate this problem. Also, if I didn't specify a path for the mapping file I wouldn't run into this problem correct?

-Ryan