Zeeshan Hirani

In the current project, I am working on,  I make use of esql heavily. One of the reason is because I am still using EF v1 which has limited support for linq queries. The second reason is, if you have dynamic queries which are build on what user selects from the search criteria, esql makes the job much easier. This is why Entity Framework supports the concepts of using builder methods.

Lot of times in your application, you have a requirement to eagerly load related collection but you want to load the collection partially and also have the data sorted when before it is materialized at the client layer. Currently in EF, there is no direct way to filter and sort and Include but there is a workaround. In this blog post, I will show you how you can use anonymous type to paritally load a collection in the correct order you desire.

Not too long ago someone asked me how can they bind data returned from stored procedure to a gridview control. There are several ways to achieve that. You can either use EntityDataSource or ObjectDataSource Control. I find it easier to use ObjectDataSource control because it allows me to encapsulate logic inside my classes. The basic steps are as follows

There are several ways to query for a single entity using Linq such as First or Single. For instance in the code below we are retrieving customer based on CustomerID

If you have used entity framework with stored procedure, you would realize it has a great designer and runtime support. Yes there are few gotchas and loose ends that needs to be fixed but it does the job 99% of the time. In this blog, I will show you how to use stored procedures to perform crud operations on a single entity.

In EF when you want to define a relationship between two entities, you typically use an association. An association can be many-to-many, 1.. 0..1, many-to-1 etc. Typically you would have tables in the database which are related to each other using foreign key constraints. When you import those tables in Entity Framework, EF would create an association.

Well most folks wouldn’t have a clue as to what the title of my posting says. This is a problem that stems from EF v1  but is now solved for the most part. in EF4.0. In version 1 of EF, it was recommended that you put your order by operation as the last operation in the query. If you do not put order by as the last operation in the query query, order by would be ignored in some cases.

Currently I am working on .net 3.5 project so i am having to live with Entity Framework. v1. Anyways i was working on a linq query that was making use of StartsWith operator. For some reason based on which page you are coming from the value passed in to the StartWith was sometimes empty. To be more clear let’s look at a sample code to understand how my scenario looked like.