ADO.net, Check if ObjectContext is writeable

Question

I have an embedded database in an asp.net mvc project. If I try to write to the file, I sometimes get a write failed exception because the SQL Server can't write to the file. How can I check an ObjectContext, if its writeable, without actually writing something to the database?

Answer 1

You could execute something like this directly against the database to find out it if is read-only or not:

SELECT DATABASEPROPERTYEX('DatabaseName','Updateability')

To do that you would use:

• EF 4.0 => ObjectContext.ExecuteStoreCommand(..)
• EF 3.5 => (ObjectContext.Connection as EntityConnection).StoreConnection as SqlConnection to get to the underlying database connection, and then create a SqlCommand.

Once you've figured this out, I'd probably turn this into an Extension method so you could do something like this:

if (ctx.ReadOnly()) ...

Hope this helps

Alex