Nested/child collections filtering in Entity Framework (ver. 1 or 4)

How to filter nested/child collections of entities when including them in EF?

Example: Let's have standard Cus开发者_开发知识库tomer-Orders association. How to load all customers and include only their last three orders in their Orders collection?

Is there something like AssociateWith function from L2S for EF?

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No, unfortunately the Object Services API in Entity Framework doesn't expose a way to selectively load associated entities based on a condition.

One way to solve this problem is to filter the associated entities when projecting the results in a query:

context.Customers.Select(c => new
    {
        Customer = c,
        LastOrders = c.Orders
                         .OrderByDescending(o => o.CreatedDate)
                         .Take(3)
                         .ToArray()
    }

Related resources:

• Loading Related Objects (Entity Framework)