Unable to use the Column attribute to associate properties to the column names using AsyncPoco

Question

I'm using the NuGet package AsyncPoco v1.2, an asynchronous fork of the Official PetaPoco - "A tiny ORM-ish thing for your POCO's". The DBRM of choice is Oracle but that's quite irrelevant.

So far the classic PetaPoco package has been working like a charm, but my problem is that the AsyncPoco package is not using the value of the Column attribute, instead it's ignoring it altogether and simply using the property name as the direct column identifier.

Example:

I create the Poco

[PrimaryKey("ID_COL", SequenceName = "SCHEMA.SCHEMA_TABLE_SEQ")]
[TableName("SCHEMA.SCHEMA_TABLE")]
public class PocoModel
{
    [Column("ID_COL")]
    public long Id { get; set; }

    [Column("NAME_COL")]
    public string Name { get; set; }
 }

I assign values to the required properties and then I attempt to perform the InsertAsync

public async Task InsertPoco(PocoModel model, DbConnection conn)
{
    var taskCompletionSource = new TaskCompletionSource<bool>();
    using (var database = new AsyncPoco.Database(conn))
    {
        await database.InsertAsync(model);
        taskCompletionSource.TrySetResult(true);
    }
    await taskCompletionSource.Task;
}

However I receive the following error when attempting to InsertAsync: "Oracle.ManagedDataAccess.Client.OracleException: ORA-00904: "NAME": invalid identifier"

That's obviously correct, since the identifier is actually "name_col" as stated in the Column attribute value.

When I change the Poco object so that it contains the actual database column names as its attribute names then the insert works fine, such as:

public class PocoModel
{
    public long ID_COL { get; set; }

    public long NAME_COL { get; set; }
 }

Is it possible to use the column attributes to identify the table columns or is there some other way around the problem? I hope I'm missing something, if not we're going to have to ditch the package as we can't be working with such unconventional property names in the business code. Changing the table column names to pascal/camel-case is not an option as its against the standards I work with.

Edit: I looked into the source code of the package where I believe the name conversion is likely to be happening (/AsyncPoco/Core/ColumnInfo.cs) and it looks quite odd indeed that it's not taking the ColumnAttribute even though it should be, here's the code:

// Read attribute
if (ColAttrs.Length > 0)
{
    var colattr = (ColumnAttribute)ColAttrs[0];
    ci.ColumnName = colattr.Name==null ? pi.Name : colattr.Name;
    ci.ForceToUtc = colattr.ForceToUtc;
    if ((colattr as ResultColumnAttribute) != null)
        ci.ResultColumn = true;
    if ((colattr as ComputedColumnAttribute) != null)
        ci.ComputedColumn = true;
}

I tried to specifically state the name of the column by using the Name property of the ColumnAttribute, but it didn't change anything (as it shouldn't, since the argument is assigned to the Name property of the ColumnAttribute, elsewhere, but I wanted to check just in case), such as:

[Column(Name = "NAME_COL")]

All input appreciated.

Answer 1

I haven't used this particular library before, but I gave the source a quick glance on github and found this ColumnAttribute. Have you tried using that instead of the .NET one?

Answer 2

Thanks to @David's hint I was able to resolve the problem. While I was never using the .NET ColumnAttribute property (neither was I suppose to) I was using the wrong one, nevertheless.

The problem was that I still had a reference to the PetaPoco namespace and was thus referencing the PetaPoco ColumnAttribute, instead of using the AsyncPoco ColumnAttribute. That does obviously not work.

Removing the reference to the PetaPoco namespace does the deed, allowing me to use the correct ColumnAttribute.