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c#sql-serverentity-frameworkdata-modeling
guhou
guhou

Reputation: 1732

Entity Framework storing arrays of data

I've started playing around with using Entity Framework Code-First because it looks like a nice way to get a database up and running quickly. I'm coming from a PostgreSQL background, which has support for array types in tables, for example time[]. My question is two-fold; does SQL Server support array types, and if so, how can I use them in EF? If they're not supported, what is an alternative way to represent this data?

table Venue
    openhours time[]

Edit: The array above is intended to store different times for each day of the week- a venue might have different opening hours on different weekends to weekdays, for example.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 2197

Answers (2)

Sorax
Sorax

Reputation: 2203

SQL Server doesn't support array types. Extrapolating from your example schema, I think an equivalent EF POCO would be the following:

public class Venue
{
   public int VenueId { get; set; }
   public DateTime OpenHour { get; set; }
   public DateTime CloseHour { get; set; }
}

Finding whether the Venue was open at a given time would just require a range query, Venue.Where(a => a.OpenHour <= time && a.CloseHour >= time). Of course, this is a very simplistic example. Most likely you'd want to store the Venue hours in another table. But I hope this may be able to move you in the right direction.

Upvotes: 1

Albin Sunnanbo
Albin Sunnanbo

Reputation: 47038

No, it is not supported, you need to store your openhours in a separate table (VenueOpenhours) with a foreign key to the Venue table.

Upvotes: 1

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