Question

I would like to preload my catalog in my web application. I’m using EF4 and would like to prefetch all my catalog data. Is there a simple way to do it with EF4 ?

DB structure :
Catalog -> Category -> [Category ->] product -> options

How can I preload all objects on application start ?

Thanks

Answer 1

You can simply call:

var data = context.Catalogs.Include("Categories.Products.Options").ToList();

I assume that Catalog has navigation property Categories, Category has navigation property Products and Product has navigation property Options. This will probably create enormous result set.

Pre-loading such big amount of data usually doesn’t make any sense. I would say don’t do it and load data on demand when you need them. Pre-loading make sense for data which do not change and present almost on every page you show to clients.