Reload all related objects / navigation properties with Entity Framework DbContext DbSet

Question

I currently have:

context.Entry(employee).Reload();
context.Entry(employee).Reference(p => p.Manager).Load();
context.Entry(employee).Reference(p => p.Department).Load();

I wish to load all related entities without specifying them individually. Something like this would be ideal:

context.Entry(employee).Reload();
context.Entry(employee).LoadAllReferences();

Can that be done?

score 1 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 11:51

We had a similar problem where an entity class is added to a collection in another class without the navigation properties being set and this was being stored in a shared DbContext.

We decided to detach the entity from context and then requery the Db if the we needed to reload the navigation properties (like these solutions: Force reload of entity in Entity Framework after insert/add and http://dev-doc.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/entity-framework-reload-newly-created.html)

Here's an example of the code we used:

   public class EntityRetriever
    {
        private readonly System.Data.Entity.DbContext _context;

        public EntityRetriever(System.Data.Entity.DbContext context)
        {
            _context = context;
        }

        public T RetrieveEntity<T>(params object[] entityKeyValues) where T : class
        {

            var entity = _context.Set<T>().Find(entityKeyValues);
            //check if is not an EF proxy class or has changed
            if (entity != null 
                && !IsProxy(entity)
                &&  _context.Entry(entity).State == System.Data.Entity.EntityState.Unchanged)
            {
                //This is the important part to reload navigation properties:
                //detach entity from context and reload from db
                _context.Entry(entity).State = System.Data.Entity.EntityState.Detached;
                entity = _context.Set<T>().Find(entityKeyValues);
            }
            return entity;
        }

        public static bool IsProxy(object entityObject)
        {
            return entityObject != null &&
                System.Data.Entity.Core.Objects
                    .ObjectContext.GetObjectType(entityObject.GetType()) != entityObject.GetType();
        }
    }

Reload all related objects / navigation properties with Entity Framework DbContext DbSet

1 Answers1