Sunday, September 5, 2010

ASP.NET/MVC/Entity Framework Error "Unable to load type....required for deserialization."

Issue: Once you compile a change in your application and run it again you can receive this error, usually upon a post to a page:

Unable to load type System.Data.Entity.DynamicProxies.ClassName_A1398804A2AD2636A55B88C252D769E3468A12F2C5A773B1895C58D312108335 required for deserialization.

Or:

Unable to find assembly 'EntityFrameworkDynamicProxies-XXXX, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null'.


What is happening here is that you are likely using POCO objects for the Entity Framework. These objects have proxy classes automatically generated for them behind the scenes. Upon a first visit to the application they are compiled, however if they are used in a post (for instance when posting data to an MVC Action) and that type is used in serialization then they have not yet been created.

Your code may look like:
[HttpPost]
public ActionResult Edit(Job job, [Deserialize] List someClasses)

When you post to this, the framework will NOT create the proxies automatically. You must access the page via a normal manner (ie via HttpGet) and the proxies will all be created. If you must have this feature, then you may possibly be able to do something in Application_Start to reference an Entity class and thus all of them should be auto generated.

In short - this fix is simply refresh the page. If posting to the page requires deserializing POCO objects from the page, then you will need to implement some mechanism to use the POCO Entities before the method is attempted, possibly in Application_Start.

9 comments:

  1. Note - I did have a 'little' success calling something like this in Application_Start
    context.YourObject.CreateObject();
    It got me past the above error, however I'm now getting
    Object of type 'System.Runtime.Serialization.TypeLoadExceptionHolder' cannot be converted to type 'XXX'
    where XXX is a custom object of mine.
    I did not change namespaces (something that can cause this issue) so still working on a resolution, but it's something you can try.
    I do know that refreshing the page from another browser window will eliminate this issue if you try again from the original browser window, so if you need a quick workaround, that will do it - obviously not ideal but if it means saving data or failing, I'd take the save.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Faced the same issue today and used Value Injecter to solve it. It's as simple as:

    var dynamicProxyMember = _repository.FindOne(m=>m.Id = 1);
    var member = new Member().InjectFrom(dynamicProxyMember) as Member;

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. You can download it here: http://valueinjecter.codeplex.com/

      Delete
    2. Having a hard time getting this to work with generic objects, where you don't really have the object until AFTER its been deserialized. So, if you have a statement like this: var objectValue = (T)formatter.Deserialize(stream)
      Any advise?

      Delete
  3. Any further tips on this issue? I put the code in app_start as suggested, and am now regularly getting TypeLoadExceptionHolder errors. Stopping IIS/aspnet_state service fixes it for a while, but not fool proof...

    ReplyDelete

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