Question

Im trying to populate my domain models and child entities with 1 SQL Store Proceedure execution. Perhaps this is answered here. Im pretty certain it’s not possible but I though I would throw the question out there to find possible work arounds.

I have quite complex domain models and im looking for a more efficient way of loading my data rather than query a customer and then lazy load its children. I have presented a simple example of what im trying to achive below;

public class Customer{
   public int Id { get; set; }
   public virtual Address Address { get; set; }
}

public class Address{
   public int Id { get; set; }
}

var customer = this.Database.SqlQuery< Customer >(“exec SP_Name”)

I know in EF5 you can return multiple data contexts but im hopeful I can resolve muliple child entities.

I hope ive made sense. Im lacking alot of sleep so apologies if it doesn’t. Following a sport in a timezone 10 hours behind makes it difficult! 🙁

Answer 1

Stored procedures in EF don’t offer eager loading. They can only load single level of entities. You can either use stored procedure with multiple result sets as mentioned in linked article but that works only with EDMX and you must execute mapped function import instead of SqlQuery. You can also simply use eager loading with LINQ query instead of stored procedure to avoid lazy loading:

var customers = context.Set<Customer>()
                       .Include(c => c.Address)
                       .FirstOrDefault(c => c.Name == someName);