How can I do more than one level of cascading deletes in Linq?

Question

If I have a Customers table linked to an Orders table, and I want to delete a customer and its corresponding orders, then I can do:

dataContext.Orders.DeleteAllOnSubmit(customer.Orders);
dataContext.Customers.DeleteOnSubmit(customer);

...which is great. However, what if I also have an OrderItems table, and I want to delete the order items for each of the orders deleted?

I can see how I could use DeleteAllOnSubmit to cause the deletion of all the order items for a single order, but how can I do it for all the orders?

Answer 1

You might wish to consider using on delete cascade on the foreign key relationship in the database rather then using LINQ to do it. If you wish to use LINQ then

customer.Orders.ForEach(x => x.OrderItems.ForEach(y=> dataContext.OrderItems.Delete(y));
dataContext.Orders.DeleteAllOnSubmit(customer.Orders);
dataContext.Customers.DeleteOnSubmit(customer);

should do it but I haven't tested it.