Help me understand entity framework 4 caching for lazy loading
- by Chris
I am getting some unexpected behaviour with entity framework 4.0 and I am hoping someone can help me understand this. I am using the northwind database for the purposes of this question. I am also using the default code generator (not poco or self tracking). I am expecting that anytime I query the context for the framework to only make a round trip if I have not already fetched those objects. I do get this behaviour if I turn off lazy loading. Currently in my application I am breifly turning on lazy loading and then turning it back off so I can get the desired behaviour. That pretty much sucks, so please help. Here is a good code example that can demonstrate my problem.
Public Sub ManyRoundTrips()
context.ContextOptions.LazyLoadingEnabled = True
Dim employees As List(Of Employee) = context.Employees.Execute(System.Data.Objects.MergeOption.AppendOnly).ToList()
'makes unnessesary round trip to the database, I just loaded the employees'
MessageBox.Show(context.Employees.Where(Function(x) x.EmployeeID < 10).ToList().Count)
context.Orders.Execute(System.Data.Objects.MergeOption.AppendOnly)
For Each emp As Employee In employees
'makes unnessesary trip to database every time despite orders being pre loaded.'
Dim i As Integer = emp.Orders.Count
Next
End Sub
Public Sub OneRoundTrip()
context.ContextOptions.LazyLoadingEnabled = True
Dim employees As List(Of Employee) = context.Employees.Include("Orders").Execute(System.Data.Objects.MergeOption.AppendOnly).ToList()
MessageBox.Show(employees.Where(Function(x) x.EmployeeID < 10).ToList().Count)
For Each emp As Employee In employees
Dim i As Integer = emp.Orders.Count
Next
End Sub
Why is the first block of code making unnessesary round trips?
