Entity framework auto eager load

Question

Is there a way to get entity objects to automatically pull all relevant data through the relationships instead of having having to .Include everything I want populated? I can't use lazy loading as this needs to be serialized to go over WCF. It would just be fantastic to have it auto populate the relevant collections.

Answer 1

No there is no build in feature which will automatically eagear load whole object graph. You must always explicitly say which navigation properties you want to eager load (by using Include method or LoadProperty method).

Edit:

Based on your comment: Generally it should be possible to build some auto loader - but it will not be easy. ObjectContext has MetadataWorkspace property which contains all metadata about your entities. You can load all information about your entities from metadata and add needed inclueds to the query. I expect one problem - you must somehow handle cyclic references. If you need some example how to extract information about entities check T4 POCO generation template.