Entity framework and VARBINARY

Question

I’m using the .NET entity framework and I’ve got one entity containing a varbinary. Is there an easy way to get the size of the varbinary in the codebehind, efter it’s been

Answer 1

A varbinary translates to a byte[] field in Entity Framework, which means you can check the Length property of the array:

int fieldSize = entity.MyVarBinaryField.Length;

As mentioned by tster: In a LINQ to Entities query, you can call the DataLength method of the SqlFunctions class, which will translate into a DATALENGTH function call in the generated SQL statement. This only works with SQL Server and Entity Framework 4 or later:

int? fieldSize = repository.Entity
  .Select(e => SqlFunctions.DataLength(e.MyVarBinaryField)).Single();