Question

I am writing a generic repository to interface with EF using DBContext.

I have a generic Get() method which receives a primary key value and returns the entity:

public class DALRepository<DALEntity> : IDisposable, IGenericRepository<DALEntity> where DALEntity : class
{
private IDbSet<DALEntity> dbSet;
private NWEntities context;

public DALRepository()
{
  context = new NWEntities();
  context.Configuration.LazyLoadingEnabled = false;
  dbSet = context.Set<DALEntity>();
}

Here’s a simple get method – just works on the PK – exactly what I want.

public DALEntity Get(string ID)
{
   return dbSet.Find(ID);
}

I now want to change this to allow the consumer to pass in a list of includes – so as well as returning just a customer they can request to return the orders as well. Here’s where I’m running into trouble. If I do this:

public DALEntity Get(string ID, IEnumerable<string> IncludeEntities = null)
{
      IQueryable<DALEntity> query = dbSet;
      query = IncludeEntities.Aggregate(query, (current, includePath) => current.Include(includePath));
}

I can’t use find with the IQueryable. And I can’t Find() directly because I can’t pass includes to it. If I use a where lambda instead on the IQueryable, how do I tell it to use the PK of the entity? I guess I could have a generic constraint that insists the generic type must implement some IPkey interface with a well-defined primary column name such as “ID”, but then I can’t use the entities generated by DBContext as they woudl have to implement this interface. I can change the T4 to do this if I need – and I’ve already changed it to emit XML comments so not too averse to that – but does anyone have a simpler way? I suppose what I need is an overloaded find() which accepts a list of includes.

So my question is either how to use Find with includes, or how to write the lambda where it knows the PK? I can’t receive such a lambda as a parameter as this will ultimately be consumed by a WCF service.

Answer 1

Kind of wierd answering your own question but in case anyone else has this issue here’s what I did. I used the dynamic LINQ stuff and used the string overloaded version of .Where(). I used one of the links mentioned to figure out how to grab the primary key (and mine is from a DBContext as well), and the method now looks like this:

public DALEntity Get(string ID, IEnumerable<string> IncludeEntities = null)
{
  var set = ((IObjectContextAdapter)context).ObjectContext.CreateObjectSet<DALEntity>();
  var entitySet = set.EntitySet;
  string[] keyNames = entitySet.ElementType.KeyMembers.Select(k => k.Name).ToArray();
  Debug.Assert(keyNames.Length == 1, "DAL does not work with composite primary keys or tables without primary keys");

  IQueryable<DALEntity> query = dbSet;
  query = IncludeEntities.Aggregate(query, (current, includePath) => current.Include(includePath));

  query = query.Where(keyNames[0] + "= @0", ID);
  return query.FirstOrDefault();
}