ado.net - Entity Framework 4 selective lazy loading properties

Question

Is it possible to load an entity excluding some properties? One of this entity's properties is expensive to select. I would like to lazy load this property. Is that possible?

Answer 1

Now that you have read everyone's reply, I will give you the correct answer. EF does not support lazy loading of properties. However it does support a much powerful concept then this. It's called table splitting where you can map a table to two entities. Say a product table in the the database can be mapped to product entity and ProductDetail entity. You can then move the expensive fields to the ProductDetail entity and then create a 1..1 association between prodcut and productdetail entity. You can then lazy load the productdetail association only when you need it. In my performance chapter of my book, I have a recipe called. 13-9. Moving an Expensive Property to Another Entity

Hope that helps!

Julie Lerman has an article on how to split a table