Specify way to load certain children explicitly

[Jeremy Kolb]

Is there a way to explicitly load children after the initial object is loaded?

My use case is: 1. Load initial object. 2. Lazily load specified child objects. 3. If we run out of memory I want to null those children so that I can repeat step 2 at a later date.

[Guillermo Gutiérrez]

Have you tried GetChildren method? You also have GetChild method if you want to load only a specific child.

[Jeremy Kolb]

GetChildren returns all the children. How does one use GetChild to just return one child?

[Guillermo Gutiérrez]

GetChildren doesn't 'return' the children, it loads them from database and assign them to the properties. GetChild does the same but only for the specified child, that seems to be what you're looking for:

// Loads all the children of the object 'foo' from the database
conn.GetChildren(foo);

// Loads the child 'Bar' from the database
conn.GetChild(f => f.Bar);  // Lambda version, compiler safe
conn.GetChild("Bar"); // <-- Equivalent