Hi,

I'd always wondered what would happen if you created an entity marked IsNew = false, set the primary key and then only set 1 or 2 properties. What would happen, would those 1 or 2 properties be set and everything else made to be null. The answer turned out to be no, it only updates the fields you set. This is awesome! Many a time to projects past I have loaded the entity, set a couple of fields and saved it back to the DB... oops!

However I ran into a bit of hiccup with this when working with nullable typed fields.

var siteCheckListItem = new SiteCheckListItemEntity();
                                siteCheckListItem.SiteOwnershipId = (int)vreSite.CurrentOwnershipId;
                                siteCheckListItem.CheckListItemId = checkListItem.CheckListItemId;
                                siteCheckListItem.IsNew = false;
                                siteCheckListItem.IsDirty = true;
                                if (checkListItemId != null && checkListItemId.Contains(checkListItem.CheckListItemId))
                                {
                                    siteCheckListItem.IsComplete = true;
                                    siteCheckListItem.DateCompleted = DateTime.Now;
                                    siteCheckListItem.MarkedCompleteById = CurrentUserId;
                                }
                                else
                                {
                                    siteCheckListItem.IsComplete = false;
                                    siteCheckListItem.DateCompleted = null;
                                    siteCheckListItem.MarkedCompleteById = null;
                                }

When the "else" branch executes it sets DateCompleted and MarkedCompleteById to null however LLBL seems to consider that a no-op as it sets IsComplete to false but ignores the other two field changes. I've found that doing this:

                                    siteCheckListItem.Fields["DateCompleted"].IsChanged = true;
                                    siteCheckListItem.Fields["MarkedCompleteById"].IsChanged = true;

forces LLBL to includes those fields in the update statement. However... I don't like this much. Is there an alternative that doesn't leave me writing an extra line of code for each property I set?

Is there an alternative that doesn't leave me writing an extra line of code for each property I set?

No

The thing is that your entity isn't fetched, so the original value (DBValue) is null, then you set the value to null, LLBLGen doesn't detect any change in that action, so, for performance the field is not included in the update list. LLBLGen doesn't know if the entity is fetched or not. In brief, you have to do what you are doing (forcing the change).

Ok thanks Daelmo