Question

I have a message table that self joins to itself where Message.ID == Message.Parent. So I have 1 Message with several ChildMessages. This is set up nicely with a Navigation property.

The code is currently:

var message = from m in soe.Messages.Include("ChildMessages")
              where m.ID == id
              && m.IsActive
              select m;
return message.FirstOrDefault();

What I really want is to only return 1 Message (that is equal to a particular ID and isActive) with all of its Active ChildMessages and I want to do it in one call to the database.

Answer 1

I’ve concluded this is not possible in Entity framework.

A work around would be to return an anonymous type that satisfies the constraint. E.g.

var message = from m in soe.Messages
              where m.ID == id
              && m.IsActive
              select
                  new
                  {
                      Message = m,
                      ChildMessages = m.ChildMessages.Where(c => c.IsActive)
                  };
return message.FirstOrDefault()