Question

In the ADO.Net Entity Framework, I have an object which has 4 references to other objects. For some reason, when I query those references, two of them load automatically (as expected), and two of them always return null.

Bizarrely enough, when I manually ask the references to load, they load just dandy.

As an example:

if (account.HoldingEntity == null && 
    account.HoldingEntityReference.EntityKey != null) {

    account.HoldingEntityReference.Load();
    account.HoldingEntity = account.HoldingEntityReference.Value;
}

When I first check the HoldingEntity it is always null, however the Load will return the HoldingEntity without problem.

Any clues?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Using ADO.NET Entities, you need to specify what entities you want to load automatically with Include, as in

Dim entity = (From e in db.Entities.Include("SubEntity"))