Question

I have two Entities: GrmDeploymentAttempt and GrmDeploymentStep. These entities have a many to many relationship through an intermediary POCO GrmDeploymentAttemptStep, which has additional information about the actual many-to-many relationship.

I am trying to load an attempt with all step information through eager loading, so right now I have the following code:

        var attempt = _context.GrmDeploymentAttempts
                              .Where(x => x.Id == attemptId)
                              .Include(x => x.AttemptSteps)
                              .FirstOrDefault();

The problem is this eager load the intermediary table, but doesn’t eager load the Steps table. How can I use the Include() with expressions to eager load my Step entity? Using the Include(string) method I could do Include("AttemptSteps.Steps") but I am not sure how to do this with expressions.

As a note, I know i could instead load the AttemptSteps entity and eager load off of there, but there are some situations where I am unable to do this and I have been wondering how to handle this.

Answer 1

var attempt = _context.GrmDeploymentAttempts
    .Where(x => x.Id == attemptId)
    .Include(x => x.AttemptSteps.Select(a => a.Step))
    .FirstOrDefault();

Include(...Select(...)) generally loads a navigation property of a child collection.