Received an invalid column length from the bcp client for colid 6

Question

I want to bulk upload csv file data to sql server 2005 from c# code but I am encountering the below error -

Received an invalid column length from the bcp client for colid 6.

when bulk copy write to database server

Solution 1

One of the data columns in the excel (Column Id 6) has one or more cell data that exceed the datacolumn datatype length in the database.

Verify the data in excel. Also verify the data in the excel for its format to be in compliance with the database table schema.

To avoid this, try exceeding the data-length of the string datatype in the database table.

Hope this helps.

Solution 2

I know this post is old but I ran into this same issue and finally figured out a solution to determine which column was causing the problem and report it back as needed. I determined that colid returned in the SqlException is not zero based so you need to subtract 1 from it to get the value. After that it is used as the index of the _sortedColumnMappings ArrayList of the SqlBulkCopy instance not the index of the column mappings that were added to the SqlBulkCopy instance. One thing to note is that SqlBulkCopy will stop on the first error received so this may not be the only issue but at least helps to figure it out.

try
{
    bulkCopy.WriteToServer(importTable);
    sqlTran.Commit();
}    
catch (SqlException ex)
{
    if (ex.Message.Contains("Received an invalid column length from the bcp client for colid"))
    {
        string pattern = @"\d+";
        Match match = Regex.Match(ex.Message.ToString(), pattern);
        var index = Convert.ToInt32(match.Value) -1;

        FieldInfo fi = typeof(SqlBulkCopy).GetField("_sortedColumnMappings", BindingFlags.NonPublic | BindingFlags.Instance);
        var sortedColumns = fi.GetValue(bulkCopy);
        var items = (Object[])sortedColumns.GetType().GetField("_items", BindingFlags.NonPublic | BindingFlags.Instance).GetValue(sortedColumns);

        FieldInfo itemdata = items[index].GetType().GetField("_metadata", BindingFlags.NonPublic | BindingFlags.Instance);
        var metadata = itemdata.GetValue(items[index]);

        var column = metadata.GetType().GetField("column", BindingFlags.Public | BindingFlags.NonPublic | BindingFlags.Instance).GetValue(metadata);
        var length = metadata.GetType().GetField("length", BindingFlags.Public | BindingFlags.NonPublic | BindingFlags.Instance).GetValue(metadata);
        throw new DataFormatException(String.Format("Column: {0} contains data with a length greater than: {1}", column, length));
    }

    throw;
}

Solution 3

I faced a similar kind of issue while passing a string to Database table using SQL BulkCopy option. The string i was passing was of 3 characters whereas the destination column length was varchar(20). I tried trimming the string before inserting into DB using Trim() function to check if the issue was due to any space (leading and trailing) in the string. After trimming the string, it worked fine.

You can try text.Trim()

Solution 4

Check the size of the columns in the table you are doing bulk insert/copy. the varchar or other string columns might needs to be extended or the value your are inserting needs to be trim. Column order also should be same as in table.

e.g, Increase size of varchar column 30 to 50 =>

ALTER TABLE [dbo].[TableName] ALTER COLUMN [ColumnName] Varchar(50)

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