Binding empty list or null value to table valued parameter on a stored procedure (.NET)

Question

I have created a stored procedure that takes a table valued parameter that is a table with a single column of type int. The idea is to simply pass a list of ids in

Answer 1

I get the error when passing an empty IEnumerable<int> but it works fine when I pass an empty List<int> instead.

Answer 2

The trick is: don’t pass in the parameter at all. The default value for a table-valued parameter is an empty table.

It is a shame that the exception message is so unhelpful.

Answer 3

I was a bit confused by what the 'not passing the parameter' statement means. What ends up working for Entity Framework ExecuteSqlCommandAsync() is this:

  new SqlParameter("yourParameterName", SqlDbType.Structured)
  {
      Direction = ParameterDirection.Input,
      TypeName = "yourUdtType",
      Value = null
  };

This will pass the parameter as 'default'.

Answer 4

Not passing a value does work but not in the case where I had multiple table value parameters to pass into the procedure. How I solved it was to specify a value of DEFAULT in my query string. For example,

string sqlQuery = "[dbo].[GetOrderData] @QueueId";

if (OrderIdList.Any())
{
    sqlQuery = sqlQuery + ", @OrderIdList";
}
else
{
    sqlQuery = sqlQuery + ", DEFAULT";
}

if (RegionIdList.Any())
{
    sqlQuery = sqlQuery + ", @RegionIdList";
}
else
{
    sqlQuery = sqlQuery + ", DEFAULT";
}

Kudos to http://www.sommarskog.se/arrays-in-sql-2008.html#Invoking where I found the solution for this.