Question

I have a graph of objects :

School–>Classes–>Students.

and I want to set it up in a way that I can send back school class to the client and it can access classes and students in a lazy-loading way.

is that possible ?

Answer 1

In brief: no.

You can either :

• send back all the data needed (including classes and students with your school entity) in a single call (“eager loading”)

or:

• you need have to have separate methods on your WCF service to retrieve detail data in a separate call (something like: List<Class> GetClassesForSchool(int schoolId), List<Student> GetStudentsForClass(int classId))

Lazy loading per se only works as long as your Entity Framework object context is still around to be queried for more data – which is certainly not the case when you send entities across the wire using WCF.