A better understanding of Eager Loading

It turns out to be a very bad idea to rely on the behavior that I mentioned in my last posting. Even though the first Linq query I mentioned tends to cause those requested objects to be loaded into the context, there is no guarantee that those are the only objects that will be brought in. For example, if I run the following code:

   List<EntityCategory> l2 = (from ec in context.EntityCategory.Include(c => c.TrackedEntity)
                                    select ec).ToList();

   List<EntityCategory> l1 = (from ec in context.EntityCategory
                                    from te in ec.TrackedEntity
                                    from ue in te.User
                                    where ue.UserId == user.UserId
                                    orderby ec.Name
                                    select ec).DistinctBy(c => c.EntityCategoryId).ToList();

... l1.First().TrackedEntity will contain ALL of the tracked entities related to the given entity category. This is because the first statement loaded all of these entities into the context, and the second statement reused the objects that were created there.

So, what have we learned? We can only trust a LINQ statement to give us the data we ask for in the select statement, and we should never trust associated entity objects to even exist, much less contain what we're expecting.

I have a plan for dealing with this, which I'll detail once I get the kinks worked out.