Question

I have a read-only database, so I am turning off ObjectTracking (thus implicitly turning off DeferredLoading).

I wish to do lazy loading and not use LoadWith<>.

What is the simplest way to explicitly tell Linq to go and lazy fetch a relation just before I need the data itself.

For example: a simple dbml

If I have the following code:

  TestDbDataContext context = new TestDbDataContext(Settings.Default.TestersConnectionString);   context.ObjectTrackingEnabled = false;    var result = context.Employees.ToList();   foreach (var employee in result)   {     // HERE Should load gift list     foreach (var gift in employee.Gifts)     {       Console.WriteLine(gift.Name);     }   } 

I know I can write a full query again, but I hope we can find together a better way.

Answer 1

You are fighting the system… 2 thoughts:

• if you know you need the other data (nested foreach), why wouldn’t you want to use LoadWith? That is pretty-much the text-book use case
• since you (from post) know that object tracking is required for lazy loading, why not just enable object tracking; data-contexts should usually be considered ‘units of work’ (i.e. short-lived), so this isn’t likely to hurt much in reality.

See the official replies here for why these two options (object tracking and deferred loading) are linked.