Showing business entities in grids with only using a few properties

Question

I am trying to get my head around business entities that you want to list in a grid or list where a user will pick one to edit/view.

Lets say I have an Entity that have a lot of properties and collections, but my Grid will only display like 2 properties to the user. Besides using lazy loading on collections what would be the best / efficient way to load this data and display to the user?

I am thinking of creating a DTO object with the required properties and pass that to the UI. But I am worrying about over populating DTO's.

Answer 1

To do maintenance on an object you could allways use a Property Grid control if your are in c#.

With this you can view/edit collection and everything else.