Question

There’s sooo much literature about fetching and eager loading when doing the actual query using .Fetch

But, once I have a loaded entity – with an empty collection (because I chose not to eager load at query time due to the cartesian product side-effect), can I choose to load a collection a bit later on, say after I’ve done some paging and I have a concrete List of items?

something like:

var list = (some linq over Session.Query<Entity>)
.Take(10).Skip(2)
.Fetch(x => x.MyCollection)
.ToList();

Session.Fetch<Entity>(list, l => l.OtherCollection);

Edit
The point is – i’m already fetching 2 child collections in the Query – makes the query and result set quite sizeable already (see nhibernate Cartesian product). I’d like page the results, get a list of 10 then optionally go back to the database to populate child collection properties of the paged (10, say) result. This is a performance consideration.

Answer 1

Issue this query

/*we dont need the result*/Session.QueryOver<Entity>()
    .Where(x => x.Id.IsIn(list.Select(l => l.Id)))
    .Fetch(l => l.OtherCollection)
    .ToList();

then nhibernate should initialize the collections on the Entities

EDIT:

to improve initial loading time see http://ayende.com/blog/4367/eagerly-loading-entity-associations-efficiently-with-nhibernate

then you can do for exmaple

var results = (some linq over Session.Query<Entity>)
    .Take(10).Skip(2)
    .ToList();

var q = Session.QueryOver<Entity>()
    .Where(x => x.Id.IsIn(list.Select(l => l.Id)))
    .Fetch(l => l.MyCollection)
    .ToFuture();

Session.QueryOver<Entity>()
    .Where(x => x.Id.IsIn(list.Select(l => l.Id)))
    .Fetch(l => l.OtherCollection)
    .ToFuture();

Session.QueryOver<Entity>()
    .Where(x => x.Id.IsIn(list.Select(l => l.Id)))
    .Fetch(l => l.ThirdCollection)
    .ToFuture();

return q.ToList()