Can I define eager loading per datacontext instead per query?

Question

Is there a way to define eager loading per entire data context, so I could state something like this -- "when using this data context when loading Customer always load associated City as well"?

So, something very similar to Options and LoadWith in Linq to Sql.

Answer 1

No Entity framework doesn't offer equivalent to DataLoadOptions available in Linq-to-Sql. There is no way to define something like LoadWith or AssociateWith globally.

Answer 2

Like Ladislav said, there currently is no way to do this in EF. However, the question comes back to why you want to do this globally rather than on a per-query basis.

If your main purpose is to abstract away eager loading out of your business layer, one options is to do something like I describe on in a blog post I wrote here. Essentially it describes a library that I want to create (time permitting) where it automatically determines how to eager load by looking at the data structure a query should be based around.

However, I don't know if that would solve the core issue of what you are trying to do or not without more detail of why you want this globally