The type initializer for 'System.Data.Entity.Internal.AppConfig' threw an exception

Question

I\'m working with EF5 in a MVC 4 aspnet website. Locally, everything works just fine, but when I publish it to the IIS and try to enter, I get the error

Answer 1

I had the duplicit definition of connection string in my WCF service. I was able to debug the service and to see the inner error message (not displayed by default):

ConfigurationErrorsException: The entry 'xxxEntities' has 
already been added. (C:\Users\WcfService\web.config line 35). 

which was after web.config transformation (note duplicit values)

<connectionStrings>
    <add name="xxxEntities" connectionString="metadata=res://*/ ...
    <add name="xxxEntities" connectionString="metadata=res://*/ ...

Hence removing unwanted connection string solved my problem.

Answer 2

I think the problem is from this line:

<context type="GdpSoftware.Server.Data.GdpSoftwareDbContext, GdpSoftware.Server.Data" disableDatabaseInitialization="true">

I don't know why you are using this approach and how it works...

Maybe it's better to try to get it out from web.config and go another way

Answer 3

I had this error today on a nested MVC application running as virtual folder in onother MVC application. In my case the InnerException was more informative than the main one. It was stating:

- The entry 'DbContextMain' has already been added. (C:\inetpub\...\web.config line x)

After fixing the duplicate connection strings in the nested apps everything worked fine.

Answer 4

I also faced the same issue, however in my case my solution has a console application and EF class library which mainly interacts with database. I removed Config settings related to EF from the Console Application Config. I maintained the following configuration settings in EF class library i.e only at one place.

This worked for me.

---

<section name="entityFramework" type="System.Data.Entity.Internal.ConfigFile.EntityFrameworkSection, EntityFramework, Version=6.2.61023.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089" requirePermission="false" />

<add name="EntityModel" connectionString="Server=Localhost\SQLEXPRESS;Database=SampleEntities;Trusted_Connection=True;" providerName="System.Data.EntityClient" />

---

Answer 5

Search in your web.config or App.Config if you have some tags that are not used in your project or you don't have in your references.

Answer 6

In connection string, the first string is the base in web.config

SchedulingContext is the base parameter of Entity file.

<connectionStrings>
     <add name="SchedulingContext" connectionString="Data Source=XXX\SQL2008R2DEV;Initial Catalog=YYY;Persist Security Info=True;User ID=sa;Password=XXX"   providerName="System.Data.SqlClient"/>