How can I call local method in Linq to Entities query?

Question

I have the following code:

public void SalesCount(string customerId)
{
  ..
  ..
  return ...;
}

var resultQuery = dataContext.Customers
.Where (c => c.Name == "Alugili")
.Where (c => SalesCount(c.CustomerId) < 100);

When I execute resultQuery I get a translation to SQL exception.

I need to call SalesCount in the Where can I do that is there any workaround for this problem!

Answer 1

Simply you can't. You can't execute C# code on the SQL server directly, you can use only Expressions and some special recognized functions...

Unless you transform your query (at least partially) in a LINQ-to-Objects...

var resultQuery = dataContext.Customers
    .Where (c => c.Name == "Alugili")
    .AsEnumerable()
    .Where (c => SalesCount(c.CustomerId) < 100);

Be aware that the last Where will be executed on the client side, so many useless rows will be fetched from the DB.

Answer 2

Try

var resultQuery = dataContext.Customers
.Where (c => c.Name == "Alugili")
.ToArray()
.Where (c => SalesCount(c.CustomerId) < 100);

But then the second Where is not run as SQL but locally - all customers with the name "Alugili" are pulled from the DB...

Otherwise you have to write out your method directly in the where method as lambda expression.