Reduce the number of queries in EF

Question

I have the following Model:

Entities:

• Product (Contains basic data for products: price, etc)
• Attribute (Contains data for all possible optional attributes)
• ProductAttribute (Contains data for optional attributes of a product, eg. Color, Model, Size). ProductAttribute is essentially a many to many relationship with payload (ProductId, AttributeID, Value)

And this piece of code:

private static void ListAttributes(Product p)
{
    p.ProductAttributes.Load();
    foreach (var att in p.ProductAttributes)
    {
        att.Attribute.load();
        Console.WriteLine("\tAttribute Name:{0} - Value {1}", 
           att.Attribute.Name,
           att.AttributeValue);
    }
}

This piece of code will fire a query for each time the att.Attribute.Load() method is called in the foreach loop, only so i can get display the name of the attribute. I would like to fetch the Attribute.Name together with the query that fetches all attribute values, i.e. join ProductAttribute and Attribute. Is there any way to achieve this within my method?

Answer 1

It seems like you have a wrapper around the EntityObject to perform the loading of each Entity on your own.

If you want to keep to this structure. I think what you need to do is overload the ProductAttributes.Load() method to accept an enum or something. Then inside that Load method you could perform a Linq-to-Entity or Entity-SQL query joins and includes the attributes for you.

var query = from c in context.Product.Include("Attributes");