Entity relationship not reading correctly from database

Question

I have an entity relationship setup in my mvc2 application such that each user has one role and each role can have many users. Like so:

 Roles         Users
--------     ---------
 RoleID--      UserID
         \
 Name     -->  RoleID

So a pretty basic many to one relationship enforced in the database and reflected in my entity relationship diagram. However when I try to get the user's role (user.Role.Name) it is always null, and I see in the database that the user's role is set to a valid ID. This is my first attempt at using entities as I had always used LINQ2SQL before and this is just baffling me.

What do?

Here's a screen shot of my edmx file

http://cl.ly/a9c088698369a54fc770

In the database the user table has a RoleID property (not sure why it isn't displaying in the diagram) and I am freely able to traverse from User to Role and it is known that it is a one to many relation to the compiler but it is just coming back as null when trying to view a user object.

EDIT:

Here's the query I use

User user = db.Users.SingleOrDefault(u => u.Username == username);
user.Role.Name

My user object isn't null and any of its other properties are visible just can't see the role, and each user has one role.

Answer 1

Find the association between User and Role in the Model Browser, then make sure that the Role property is defined as a Navigation Property.

Answer 2

You need to load any references manually like:

Users.Roles.Load()

Added bonus:

Get out the generic repository ... awesome.