Question

I’m working on a new project and got some experience with Entity Framework 3.5. Now that I’m building the model and writing the first methods I notice that Entity Framework 4 seems to load every reference to which a navigation property exists. In 3.5 I had to manually .Include() each entity that was referenced if I wanted to access them. It even loads nested references. I’ve got 3 tables that look something like this:

Container(PK: container_Id, Name),
Text(PK: text_Id, FK: container_Id, Name),
Binary(PK: binary_Id, FK: text_Id, Name)

and if I do var containerList = Context.Container.ToList(); everything gets loaded, even down to the binary table.

Was this behavior changed or is there some options that I can use to disable this automatic loading of each and every reference?

Answer 1

Lazy loading was enabled by default in EF 4. You can disable the lazy loading.

Disable lazy loading by default in Entity Framework 4