Is there an Oracle EF equivalent to SqlFunctions.StringConvert?

Question

Consider a query where I need to treat a NUMBER column as a string, either for query purposes or simply because I want a string returned. In a normal Oracle query I could use TO_CHAR and things are fine. Entity Framework doesn't let you do that directly.
To get around the problem, Microsoft created a [url http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd466166.aspx] SQLFunctions class that does let you perform certain conversions inside Linq to Entities queries. It doesn't seem to work with the Oracle EF provider (which isn't surprising given that it was built for SQL Server), so I'm wondering if there's an Oracle equivalent?
Thanks.
Edited by: Tridus on Jun 13, 2011 9:49 AM Fixed link.

Answer 1

No equivalent in ODP.NET yet.
As a workaround, you may want to create a user defined stored function to be included in the model, and create a stub function to map to it.
For example,
class myFuncClass
[EdmFunction("Model.Store", "UDF_TO_CHAR")]
public static string ToCharFunc(decimal value, string format_mask, ...)
throw new NotSupportedException("Direct calls are not supported");
Where UDF_TO_CHAR is a user defined stored function that uses TO_CHAR to convert the input value with format_mask, nls_lang.
Then use myFuncClass.ToCharFunc(value, format, nls_lang) in LINQ query.