Entity Framework: ObjectContext.ExecuteStoreQuery produces detached objects

Question

I need to run some custom SQL to return a list of objects from a table. I'm using ExecuteStoreQuery for that.

var q = context.ExecuteStoreQuery<ProductionUnit>(MySelectString, new SqlParameter("@ProductionUnitId", value));

This does result in q containing an ObjectResult collection, but the actual ProductionUnit elements are Detached and their EntityKey is null. This creates a number of issues when trying to work on some of these objects or their relationships. My SQL query returns a result set containing all the columns of the respective ProductionUnits table (and nothing more).

Anything else I need to do in order to have these objects tracked or is this behavior by design?

Answer 1

Solved it myself - you need to use the ExecuteStoreQuery overload which allows you to specify the EntitySet name for your returned entities.

Answer 2

As there doesn't seem to be an accepted answer with code...

As @neaorin says, to ensure changes to returned entities are tracked, use the method

ExecuteStoreQuery<..>(commandText, entitySetName, MergeOptions, args paramaters)

as follows:

string strQuery = "SELECT * FROM employees WHERE id=999";
List<employee> employees;
services = context.ExecuteStoreQuery<employee>(strQuery, "employees", System.Data.Objects.MergeOption.AppendOnly).ToList();

The MergeOptions parameter dictates what the Framework does if some of these returned entities are already floating around in the context, i.e. whether to overwrite them or use the existing objects (the default).