Question

I am using WCF Data Services 5.0 with the EF DbContext.

I see old articles that say you can use Expand and LoadProperty to get WCF to return related entities in the one request.

The only equivalent I see with DbContext is Include, but that doesn’t seem to work.

Is there any way to load all the related records when working with a DbContext?

I am using the below code (one CategoryGroup can contain many Category entities):

[WebGet]
    public IQueryable<CategoryGroup> GetAllCategories(string activationCode)
    {
        try
        {
            var db = this.CurrentDataSource;

            var licence = db.Licenses
                .Include("Contact")
                .FirstOrDefault();

            if (licence != null)
            {
                var customerId = licence.Contact.CustomerId;

                return db.CategoryGroups.Include("Categories").Where(r => r.CustomerId == customerId);
            }
        }
        catch(Exception ex)
        {

        }

        return new List<CategoryGroup>().AsQueryable();
    }

This function only returns the CategoryGroup entities (without related Category entities) in the OData format.

Answer 1

Currently the WCF DS server can’t auto-expand. So having the Include in the code above has no effect on the response from the service operation. Expansions can only be requested by the client through the $expand query option.