If you are working with LINQ to SQL, you may be familiar with this exception message:
"Cannot add an entity with a key that is already in use."
This typically comes up when you are working with LINQ to SQL, as I am, in a "disconnected " situation. In my case, I am working with a Silverlight Application, so I get some data with one DataContext, then pass it out to my Silverlight application (this is the same with any other web application), make changes to it, pass it back to the server where it gets updated using a different instance of my DataContext.
The interesting thing in my case is that I thought I fixed the problem but I still got the exception. I'll explain why. But first, there are several ways you can resolve this issue. How you choose to fix this will have to do with how your database is set up initially. I am working with an existing database and there are limits to how I can change the db. So I have my all of the properties in my LINQ to SQL Entities set as "UpdateCheck = UpdateCheck.Never". Next I'll "Attach" my entity to my DataContext but before I do that, I'll "Detach" it My Detach() method "resets" all of the EntitySets and EntityRefs connected to my entity so that LINQ to SQL doesn't think I am trying to insert them into the database. Sorry, I'm not going into details on this process in this blog post but you can easily find details on the web. Now I can attach my disconnected entity to my DataContext like this:
using (ABCDataContext db = new ABCDataContext())
{
foo.Detach();
db.Foos.Attach(foo, true);
db.SubmitChanges();
}
This should work fine. But it wasn't working in my case. Why? It is a typical case of how various steps I took to resolve the a different problem ended up causing new problems. I was debugging and trying a bunch of stuff because my calls to Attach were throwing exceptions. There is an overload to the Attach() method that would look like this -- db.Attach(newEntity, originalEntity) -- so that LINQ to SQL can compare the two items. I had been playing around with it but when I commented out my code, I forgot to comment out one line, so it looked like this:
using (ABCDataContext db = new ABCDataContext())
{
foo.Detach();
Foo oldFoo = db.Foos.SingleOrDefault(f => f.FooId == foo.FooId); // NOT REMOVING THIS LINE CAUSED THE EXCEPTION!
//db.Foos.Attach(foo, oldFoo);
db.Foos.Attach(foo, true);
db.SubmitChanges();
}
When I run this, I get the exception "Cannot add an entity with a key that is already in use". For some reason, even though I wasn't working with "oldFoo", LINQ to SQL didn't like the fact that I requested it from the database. So I commented out that line (Foo oldFoo = db.Foos.SingleOrDefault...) and everything just started working fine.
It was a pain but it is over now. Now it is time to solve more problems...