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 Tuesday, September 05, 2006
Figuring out whats wrong with your DataSet when you get a System.Data.ConstraintException

I recently ran into a problem with a large DataSet when I set the EnforceConstraints to true. It gave me the error “Failed to enable constraints. One or more rows contain values violating non-null, unique, or foreign-key constraints.” without any clue as to where to look or what to do. Googling the problem, I came across a blog by Dave Lloyd with a good method to figure out exactly where the error is. The only problem was the example code was Dimmed. Naturally I un-Dimmed the code and put it in a proper C# format. I then encapsulated it into a nice little static function that returns a NameValueCollection loaded with all of the relevant error info. The info returned tells you what table, what row/column, and what the constraint is.

private static NameValueCollection BuildDataSetErrorInfo(DataSet dataSet)     
        {     
            NameValueCollection errorInfo = new NameValueCollection();     
            errorInfo.Add("DataSetName: ", dataSet.DataSetName);     
            foreach (DataTable table in dataSet.Tables)     
            {     
                DataRow[] rows = table.GetErrors();     
                if ((rows != null) && (rows.Length > 0))     
                {     
                    errorInfo.Add("Table: ", table.TableName);     
                    foreach (DataRow row in rows)     
                    {     
                        errorInfo.Add("Row Error: ", row.RowError);     
                        DataColumn[] cols = row.GetColumnsInError();     
                        if ((cols != null) && (cols.Length > 0))     
                        {     
                            foreach (DataColumn col in cols)     
                            {     
                                errorInfo.Add("Column: ", col.ColumnName);     
                                errorInfo.Add("Column Error: ", row.GetColumnError(col));     
                            }     
                        }     
                    }     
                }     
            }     
            return errorInfo;     
        }   
 
 | 
posted on September 5, 2006  #    by Bary Nusz  Comments [0]
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