Association properties not populated for entities returned by a stored procedure

Question

I have written a stored procedure that returns data and mapped it to an existing entity type, which happens to have association properties, relating it to other entities. The association properties are populated properly if I query the entity itself (as expected, since the entity corresponds to a real table in the database), but when I query the function that is mapped to my stored procedure, the resulting entity does not have its association properties populated. Am I doing something wrong?

Thanks,
Pando

Answer 1

Hi Pando,

 

Could you explain the “association properties” you mentioned?

If you mean the navigate properties, that is because the scenario does meet the requirement to get navigate properties.

 

Only when the parent and children is in the objectcontext, you can get navigate properties.

 

For example,

var q= slecect p in context.Parents.Include(“Children”) where …  select p;

 

In that way, the parent and children are all in the context. Then you can use,

Foreach(var p in q)

{

      Foreach(var c in p.Children)

      {

           ………

      }

}

 

 

 

Does this work for you? If you have any questions or concerns, please update the thread and we will have a further discussion.

 

 

Best Regards

Yichun Feng

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Answer 2

In EF4, if you expose any of the tables' foreign keys in your model, and return them through your stored procedure, the EF should fix up the relationships for you using these foreign key values. Of course, this only works for EF4, not EF3.5. In EF3.5, you will need to load the relationship references, e.g. Foo.BarReference.Load().

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Answer 3

The terminology I used in my original post was incorrect. By association properties I meant both the navigation properties and the EntityReference.EntityKey properties. Both are null. I realize that the navigation properties should be null, but I don't understand why the EntityReference.EntityKey properties are also null. I would think that this will make it impossible to load the associated entities (or even get access to their foreign keys).

By the way, I captured the EF-generated SQL query that calls the stored procedure in SQL Server Profiler, and verified that if I run it manually the foreign key fields are populated properly in the resulting data.

Thanks,
Pando