Question

I have a customer table in the db that stores the name, address etc, along with some photo, logo and other images.

I am using entity framework and I would like to know how to tackle the situation where I only want to bring back basic data about the customer in certain situations vs the complete data including images.

Should I have two entities, CustomerBasic and CustomerComplete

OR

have one Customer entity and fill it with two separate methods, FillBasic, FillComplete.

Any best practices? i’m new to EF.

Answer 1

It really depends on your repository structure if any – with EF itself you can just use a projection with the properties you do want to a business object instance that represents a “basic customer”, i.e.

var customerBasicList = context.Customers
                               .Where(...)
                               .Select( c => new CustomerBasic() 
                               {
                                 FirstName = c.FirstName,
                                 LastName = c.LastName,
                               }).ToList();

Performance becomes more important when you have a collection property (i.e. images in your example) in your entity. In your case you can take advantage of lazy loading to only materialize those properties when and if needed.