Question

Suppose I have the following “Foo” and “Bar” entities:

class Foo {
   int FooId;
   string FooName;
}

class Bar {
   int BarId;
   Foo RelatedFoo;
   string BarName;
}

Let’s also suppose that I want “RelatedFoo” to be lazy-loaded by default.

In Entity Framework, is it possible to do a query that returns an enumerable of “Bar” entities where elements are sorted by “bar.RelatedFoo.FooName”?

If so, can this be done in a fixed number of database queries? I would like to avoid doing N+1 queries.

If not, is this possible in another .NET ORM framework?

Answer 1

var bars = _context.Bars.OrderBy(b => b.RealtedFoo.FooName)

You may also want to only bring back those bars that RealtedFoo is not null

var bars = _context.Bars.Where(b => b.RelatedFoo != null).OrderBy(b => b.RealtedFoo.FooName)

Update:

    //For EF only
    _context.Configuration.LazyLoadingEnabled = false

    //If you want to bring back RealtedFoo then include it. 
//Otherwise, you can just query for it and not use the Include() extension.
    var bars = _context.Bars.Include(b => b.RealtedFoo).Where(b => b.RelatedFoo != null).OrderBy(b => b.RealtedFoo.FooName)