Child Properties Not Initialised Automatically With RIA?

Question

Within my project I have created an Entity Data Model, complete with relationship links between the various tables. I notice when I do so, Visual Studio automatically creates a property named after this link.

I have then generated a Domain Service Class based on this data model, and once again within this a property is generated representing the link, ie within my ChemicalApplication class there is a Chemical property of type Chemical.

The trouble is, within the silverlight client, I can access the ChemicalApplication data object no bother, and can see the ChemicalApplication.Chemical property, but as soon as I try to access it, I recieve an error that the property is not initialised.

Do these auto-generated child properties not automatically initialise? If not, how do i manually assign a value to them within the RIA Domain Service?

Answer 1

I managed to find how to do this manually. Within RIA Dataservice Get() method, simply add ".Include("table_name")"

E.g in my GetChemicalApplicationByUser function I bind to two sub tables:

Public Function GetChemicalApplicationsByUser(ByVal query As String) As IQueryable(Of ChemicalApplication)
    Return Me.ObjectContext.ChemicalApplications.Include("Chemical") _
                                                .Include("ProcessStatus") _
                                                .Where(Function(f) f.requestedByUsername = query)
End Function

Within the class metadata, you will also need to add Include() i.e:

<MetadataTypeAttribute(GetType(ChemicalApplication.ChemicalApplicationMetadata))>  _
Partial Public Class ChemicalApplication


Friend NotInheritable Class ChemicalApplicationMetadata


    Private Sub New()
        MyBase.New
    End Sub

    Public Property aspectSummaryUpdate As Nullable(Of Boolean)

    Public Property bunding As Nullable(Of Boolean)

    Public Property CARQ() As Byte

    <Include()>
    Public Property Chemical As Chemical

etc...

Hope this helps someone else in future.