Roger Alsing Weblog

When Linq To Sql was released we were told that it did support eager loading.
Which was a bit misleading, it did allow us to fetch the data we wanted upfront, but it did so by issuing one database query per object in the result set.
That is, one query per collection per object, which is a complete performance nightmare. (Ripple loading)

Now in Entity Framework 4, we can actually do true eager loading.
EF4 will issue a single query that fetches the data for all the objects in a graph.
This have been possible in other mappers for a long time, but I still think it is awesome that Microsoft have finally listened to the community and created a framework that from what I’ve seen so far, does exactly what we want.

So how do you use eager loading in EF4 ?

Eager loading is activated by calling “ObjectSet[of T].Include(”Details.Product”)”, that is, a dot separated property path.
You can also call include multiple times if you want to load different paths in the same query.

There are also a few attempts out in the blog world to try to make it easier to deal with eager loading, e.g. by trying to remove the untyped string and use lambda expressions instead.

I personally don’t like the lambda approach since you can’t traverse a collection property that way; “Orders.Details.Product” , there is no way to write that as a short and simple lambda.

My own take on this is to use extension methods instead.
I always use eager loading on my aggregates, so I want a simple way to tell my EF context to add the load spans for my aggregates when I issue a query.
(Aggregates are about consistency, and Lazy Load causes consistency issues within the aggregate, so I try to avoid that)

Here is how I create my exstension methods for loading complete aggregates:

public static class ContextExtensions
{
  public static ObjectQuery<Order>
           AsOrderAggregate(this ObjectSet<Order> self)
  {
    return self
        .Include("Details.ProductSnapshot")
        .Include("CustomerSnapshot");
  }
}

This makes it possible to use the load spans directly on my context without adding anything special to the context itself.
(You can of course add this very same method inside your context if you want, I simply like small interfaces that I can extend from the outside)

This way, you can now issue a query using load spans like this:

var orders = from order in context.OrderSet.AsOrderAggregate()
             select order;

And if you want to make a projection query you can simply drop the “AsOrderAggregate” and fetch what you want.

HTH.

//Roger

[EDIT]
I was wrong!

It is perfectly possible to do one directional associations in EF4 and POCO mode.
You simply have to manually remove the “ <NavigationProperty ..” tags from your mapping files.

Awesome work EF4 design team :-)

[/EDIT]

Original post:
To my surprise I’ve found out that Entity Framework 4 don’t support one directional collection properties.
That is, if you have the entity “Order” which has an “Details” property, then the “OrderDetail” entity _must_ have an “Order” property.

To make things worse, those properties do not have any auto sync mechanism if you are using POCO entities.
They could very well have supported this by adding an inverse management aspect to their run-time proxies that they use for lazy loading in POCO.

While I do think this is a lacking feature, it is not really a show stopper for me.
We can work around this problem by applying the “Law of Demeter” principle.

We can design our entities like this:

OrderDetail:

public class OrderDetail
{
    ...properties...

    [Obsolete("For EF4 Only!",true)]
    public OrderDetail()
    { }

    public OrderDetail(Order order)
    {
        this.Order = order;
    }
}

Order:

public class Order
{
    ...properties...

    public void AddProduct(Product product,
                                   double quantity,
                                   double itemPrice)
    {
        var detail = new OrderDetail(this)
        {

//offtopic: you might want to associate
//the product via ID or via a snapshot instead
//depending on how you deal with cross aggregate references
            Product = product,

            Quantity = quantity,
            ItemPrice = itemPrice,
        };

        Details.Add(detail);
    }
}

This way, we get a whole bunch of positive effects:

We solve the problem with inverse properties, inverse management is handled inside the “AddProduct” method in the order.

We get a nice way to handle consistency in our aggregate roots, the methods can easily update any accumulated values in the order or change status of the order when we add or remove order details.
This is what aggregates in DDD is all about so you should probably do this anyway, regardless if EF4 did support inverse property management or not.

We add domain semantics to the model, “AddProduct” or “ChangeQuantity” have meaning in our model, thus we get a more self explaining model.

This is a quite nice example of how lacking framework features can force you to write better code.
If we did have support for inverse property management, we might get sloppy and just go the path of least resistance.

//Roger