Data type conversion

bryantb2

I have manually mapped 2 databases as follows:

tableMapping.FieldMappings.Add(new FieldMapping(tableMapping.Obj1.Fields["pa_firstname"], tableMapping.Obj2.Fields["FirstName"], FieldMappingStatus.Success));
tableMapping.FieldMappings.Add(new FieldMapping(tableMapping.Obj1.Fields["pa_lastname"], tableMapping.Obj2.Fields["LastName"], FieldMappingStatus.Success));
tableMapping.MatchingMappings.Add(new FieldMapping(tableMapping.Obj1.Fields["pa_id"], tableMapping.Obj2.Fields["SurrogateKey"], FieldMappingStatus.Success));

My problem is that when I call CompareDatabases I receive the following error:

RedGate.SQLCompare.Engine.SqlCompareException was unhandled
Message=Unable to compare between fields pa_id and SurrogateKey, types being compared System.Int64 and System.String.
Source=RedGate.SQLDataCompare.Engine

Is it possible to compare a field, in this case "pa_id", as a varchar type rather than its native type?

Chris.Allen

The thing to do here would be to cast into a view and then perform the comparison

bryantb2

That's what we were doing as an interim solution. It would be nice if widening conversions could be handled somehow without the use of a view though.