Getting arbirary exceptions when using Subsonic 3

First and foremost: the t4 templates are there for you to change as needed with SS3. That was the main idea with using T4 - I don't want to back you into my silliness :).

To the question at hand - I think this might be a bug in our templates that refuses to stick a value into the PK field:

    ISqlQuery BuildInsertQuery(T item) {
        ITable tbl = _db.FindTable(typeof(T).Name);
        Insert query = null;
        if (tbl != null) {
            var hashed = item.ToDictionary();
            query = new Insert(_db.Provider).Into<T>(tbl); ;
            foreach (string key in hashed.Keys) {
                IColumn col = tbl.GetColumn(key);
                if (!col.IsPrimaryKey) {
                    query.Value(key, hashed[key]);
                }
            }
        }
        return query;
    }

In this, our check should actually be...

                if (!col.IsPrimaryKey && !col.AutoIncrement) {
                    query.Value(key, hashed[key]);
                }

In this way, the non-identity will be inserted. But in reading your issue here, it sounds to me like you're not trying to insert into a non-identity.

The email you sent me doesn't say anything about PKs as identity - your PK was a thing called "NAme" which is a string type and not and identity (auto-increment).

I'm wondering about when I cannot get around this issue--when I have to add a new record to the database and have an identity as my primary key.

This is what SubSonic assumes - that your PK is an IDENTITY column. If you ONLY have an IDENTITY column, we can't help you because this is a deadlocked table in that you can't insert any value into it, therefor you can't tick the IDENTITY column. Your only recourse at this point is to SET IDENTITY INSERT="off", which defeats the purpose.

Hopefully this will answer your question? If I'm not getting it - can you do this for me:

1. One sentence: what can't you do and what's the error
2. What did you expect

Thanks Will and I hope I'm not being thick.

I'm getting there - we're in the clean up phase and I'm happy to say Eric's jumped back into the fray :). I ran perf tests the other day and fixed up some bottle-necks and the core is pretty much where we want it to be.

I have no idea when it will be ready...