C# – ASP.NET MVC – Attaching an entity of type ‘MODELNAME’ failed because another entity of the same type already has the same primary key value

asp.net-mvccentity-framework

In a nutshell the exception is thrown during POSTing wrapper model and changing the state of one entry to 'Modified'. Before changing the state, the state is set to 'Detached' but calling Attach() does throw the same error. I'm using EF6.

Please find my code below(model names have been changed to make it easier to read)

Model

// Wrapper classes
        public class AViewModel
        {
            public A a { get; set; }
            public List<B> b { get; set; }
            public C c { get; set; }
        }

Controller

        public ActionResult Edit(int? id)
        {
            if (id == null)
            {
                return new HttpStatusCodeResult(HttpStatusCode.BadRequest);
            }

            if (!canUserAccessA(id.Value))
                return new HttpStatusCodeResult(HttpStatusCode.Forbidden);

            var aViewModel = new AViewModel();
            aViewModel.A = db.As.Find(id);

            if (aViewModel.Receipt == null)
            {
                return HttpNotFound();
            }

            aViewModel.b = db.Bs.Where(x => x.aID == id.Value).ToList();
            aViewModel.Vendor = db.Cs.Where(x => x.cID == aViewModel.a.cID).FirstOrDefault();

            return View(aViewModel);
        }

[HttpPost]
        [ValidateAntiForgeryToken]
        public ActionResult Edit(AViewModel aViewModel)
        {
            if (!canUserAccessA(aViewModel.a.aID) || aViewModel.a.UserID != WebSecurity.GetUserId(User.Identity.Name))
                return new HttpStatusCodeResult(HttpStatusCode.Forbidden);

            if (ModelState.IsValid)
            {
                db.Entry(aViewModel.a).State = EntityState.Modified; //THIS IS WHERE THE ERROR IS BEING THROWN
                db.SaveChanges();
                return RedirectToAction("Index");
            }
            return View(aViewModel);
        }

As shown above line

db.Entry(aViewModel.a).State = EntityState.Modified;

throws exception:

Attaching an entity of type 'A' failed because another entity of the
same type already has the same primary key value. This can happen when
using the 'Attach' method or setting the state of an entity to
'Unchanged' or 'Modified' if any entities in the graph have
conflicting key values. This may be because some entities are new and
have not yet received database-generated key values. In this case use
the 'Add' method or the 'Added' entity state to track the graph and
then set the state of non-new entities to 'Unchanged' or 'Modified' as
appropriate.

Does anybody see anything wrong in my code or understand in what circumstances it would throw such error during editing a model?

Best Answer

Problem SOLVED!

Attach method could potentially help somebody but it wouldn't help in this situation as the document was already being tracked while being loaded in Edit GET controller function. Attach would throw exactly the same error.

The issue I encounter here was caused by function canUserAccessA() which loads the A entity before updating the state of object a. This was screwing up the tracked entity and it was changing state of a object to Detached.

The solution was to amend canUserAccessA() so that the object I was loading wouldn't be tracked. Function AsNoTracking() should be called while querying the context.

// User -> Receipt validation
private bool canUserAccessA(int aID)
{
    int userID = WebSecurity.GetUserId(User.Identity.Name);
    int aFound = db.Model.AsNoTracking().Where(x => x.aID == aID && x.UserID==userID).Count();

    return (aFound > 0); //if aFound > 0, then return true, else return false.
}

For some reason I couldnt use .Find(aID) with AsNoTracking() but it doesn't really matter as I could achieve the same by changing the query.

Hope this will help anybody with similar problem!

Related Topic