Enhance InvalidOperationException message fo better cause understaning

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
25/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
csharp
Domain
database

Research direction

No files, tests, or code entry points are named. Start by reproducing the reported query-translation failure involving OrderBy and compare it with the simplified query steps described in the issue. Done means the failure identifies the specific untranslatable expression and explains why translation failed.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

area-groupby area-query customer-reported

While writing some complex queries it's easy to face an InvalidOperationException that says that the expression can't not be translated.

Often I find an obvious cause just by taking a better look at a misuse of an untranslatable function or a bad use of a group by. Sometimes, however, it is a little tougher and I start breaking the query into several steps until I find the point where it becomes untranslatable.

This time I ran into a strange situation where applying an OrderBy breaks the query translation and however I tried to simplify or make the query more straightforward, I was unable to get to work. The InvalidOperationException states that the whole Expression cannot be translated, but I guess the engine knows on which part of the expression it fails transalating.

It would be helpful if the exception could suggest which part of the expression caused the problem and, of course, why it couldn't. The exception should be more specific than a System.InvalidOperationException, with at least the specific Expression (or a list of them) where the problem occurred, but it would be better to also have the reason.

Dominant language
C#
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Avg merge
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Merged PRs (30d)
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