Entity Framework: Re-finding objects recently added to context

The newly added object is in the local DataSource, since it's not persisted yet in the database,

so you may say:

EntityObject search = ents.EntityObject.FirstOrDefault(o => o.Id == theId) ??
                      ents.EntityObject.Local.FirstOrDefault(o => o.Id == theId);

This happens because ents.EntityObject.WhatEver always queries the datasource. This is a design decision. They do it this way, because else they would have to execute the query against the datasource, against the local cache and then merge the results. As one of the developers pointed out in a blog (cannot remember where exactly) they were unable to handle this consistently.

As you can imagine there are a lot of corner an edge cases you have to handle properly. You could just find a id you created locally, created by someone else in the database. This would force you to be prepared to handle conflicts on (almost) every query. Maybe they could have made methods to query the local cache and methods to query the datasource, but that is not to smart, too.

You may have a look at Transparent Lazy Loading for Entity Framework. This replaces the normal code generator and you get entities that populate their related entity collections and entity references automatically on access. This avoids all the

if (!Entity.ReleatedEntities.IsLoaded)
{
   Entity.RelatedEntities.Load();
}

code fragments. And you can query the collections because they are always implicitly loaded. But this solution is not perfect, too. There are some issues. For example, if you create a new entity and access a collection of related entities, you will get an exception because the code is unable to retrieve the related entities from the database. There is also an issue concerning data binding and may be some more I am not aware of.

The good thing is that you get the source code and are able to fix the issues yourself and I am going to examine the first issue if I find some time. But I am quite sure that it will not be that easy to fix, because I expect some case were just not hitting the database if the entity has just been created is not the expected behavior.

I was in the same situation. I wrote this extension method that at least for me solves the problem (I don't have issues with i.e conflicts in my context...)

    public static IEnumerable<T> WhereInclAdded<T>(this ObjectSet<T> set, Expression<Func<T, bool>> predicate)  where T : class
    {
        var dbResult = set.Where(predicate);

        var offlineResult = set.Context.ObjectStateManager.GetObjectStateEntries(EntityState.Added).Select(entry => entry.Entity).OfType<T>().Where(predicate.Compile());

        return offlineResult.Union(dbResult);
    }

The extension method bellow is to DbSet<>

public static T TryAttach<T>(this DbSet<T> dbSet, T entity, Expression<Func<T, bool>> predicate) where T : class
{
     T found = dbSet.Local.SingleOrDefault(predicate.Compile());
     if (found == null) dbSet.Attach(entity);
     return found ?? entity;
}

How to use:

contextInstance.MyEntity.TryAttach(entityInstance, e => e.ID == entityInstance.ID);

btw: I love generics!