Question

I have the following scenario.

I have one table in the database A that contains a lot of entries. This table is lightweight and only have a bit of data for each entry.

Another table B has a many to one relationship with A, and can contain lots of data.

I have a client and a server in my application that communicates using WCF.

My problem is that when the client calls a method on the server that should return all the A‘s, I get much more data than I need to. On the server I basically have a single line of code:

return entityContext.A.ToList();

My problem is that on the client, if I debug and inspect the returned collection, each element has the property B populated with all the data from the expensive table.

I only needed the basic data from the A table to show a list on the client, but ended up sending a ton of data over the wire.

So the question is, how can I make the server ignore the B table when I fetch the data to send to the client. Basically, I need something like the oposite of Include.

Answer 1

You need to turn off lazy loading. It can be done either through designer or in code by calling:

entityContext.ContextOptions.LazyLoadingEnabled = false;