Ria Services - Delay load images (or any heavy binary data)

Question

I have an RIA Service that returns image data (Byte[]) and caption of image (String) from SQL Server.

The data part can sometimes be a few MB's so it can take quite a while to load.

I would like to load the bytes independently of the caption (which loads very fast).

Is there a way to do this without having to create a second image context?

Answer 1

Each domain service call executes asynchronously, so if you have two calls, one for the data and one for the title you should be able to show the title whilst the data is still loading.

It does mean you'll have to have two separate entities, ImageTitle and ImageName however, but maybe you could link them somehow, maybe a container entity?