How can one get visual studio to do a simple change instead of a drop/add when altering database table columns?

Question

Simply put:

I am trying to use a visual studio database project to update my sql server database
I change the names of the table columns by using the refactoring tool
Once the column names are changed I do a schema comparison before making any final changes to the database
However, I notice that it will drop the column who's name has been changed and then immediately re-adds it (this obviously leads to data loss which I don't want)
How then can I change the settings in someway to make it do a simple change not a drop/add when changing the names of the columns

score 0 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 11:50

0

See this for renaming columns. Not sure about VS diff code generation, you might have to modify the generated script yourself.

edited May 23 '17 at 11:50

Community

answered Mar 21 '15 at 00:15

tne

Unfortunately, if I were to go in and modify each one manually I would also have to modify all 600 references manually as well (that's a literal number by the way), and in most cases that's just for one table. I have 40+ tables to modify, so I really need an automated solution. – brykim1 Mar 22 '15 at 00:58
@brykim1 Understood; it's a shame. You'll probably want to find/file a report on Connect or the UserVoice site, and hack something in the meantime. There might be third-party tools to help with that. It could also be that there is a reason why they don't do it automatically, and you'd thus want to know about it. – tne Mar 22 '15 at 15:45

1 Answers1