Forcing eager-loading for a navigation property

Question

I'm using EF Code First and I have a navigation property called Category that I want eager loaded in every call:

public class Product
{
    ...
    public Category Category { get; set; }
}

To do this I have to include it in every call I'll do on Product

var results = from p in db.Products.Include("Category") select p;

Is there a way to have Category property eager loaded, therefore generation a SQL join, in every call without having to include it every time?

thank you

Are you looking to disable lazy loading for the entire context or just these specific entities? — Marek Karbarz, May 10 '11 at 19:42

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered May 10 '11 at 19:46

3

One simple way would be to define an extension method

static class DbExtensions{
   public IQueryable<Product> ProductsWithCategories(this MyContext db) {
       return db.Products.Include("Category");
   }
}

Which allows you to use

var results = from p in db.ProductsWithCategories() select p;

Not sure if it brings much benefit though...

answered May 10 '11 at 19:46

jeroenh

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I though about that but I wondered if there was a standard way, through data annotations of fluent API, to always eager-load :) – Anderson Fortaleza May 10 '11 at 20:04

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered May 10 '11 at 19:56

You can use helper method as proposed by @jeroenh but it will not solve situation where you for example want to load order with all ordered products and their categories. EF doesn't have any automatic eager loading configuration as for example available in Linq-to-sql. You must always use Include (either directly or by some helper construction).

Forcing eager-loading for a navigation property

2 Answers2

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