EF Core include related ids but not related entities - sql

Question

Before I go creating my own SQL scripts by hand for this, I have a scenario where I want to get the ids of a foreign key, but not the entirety of the foreign entities, using EF Core.
Right now, I'm getting the ids manually by looping through the related entities and extracting the ids one at a time, like so:
List<int> ClientIds = new List<int>();
for (var i = 0; i < Clients.length; i++){
ClientIds.add(Clients.ElementAt(i).Id);
}
To my understanding, this will either cause data returns much larger than needed (my entity + every related entity) or a completely separate query to be run for each related entity I access, which obviously I don't want to do if I can avoid it.
Is there a straightforward way to accomplish this in EF Core, or do I need to head over the SQL side and handle it myself?
Model:
public class UserViewModel {
public UserViewModel(UserModel userModel){
ClientIds = new List<int>();
for (var i = 0; i < UserModel.Clients.length; i++){
ClientIds.add(Clients.ElementAt(i).Id);
}
//...all the other class asignments
}
public IEnumerable<int> ClientIds {get;set;}
//...all the other irrelevant properties
}
Basically, I need my front-end to know which Client to ask for later.

Answer 1

It looks like you are trying to query this from within the parent entity. I.e.
public class Parent
{
public virtual ICollection<Client> Clients { get; set; }
public void SomeMethod()
{
// ...
List<int> ClientIds = new List<int>();
for (var i = 0; i < Clients.length; i++)
{
ClientIds.add(Clients.ElementAt(i).Id);
}
// ...
}
}
This is not ideal because unless your Clients were eager loaded when the Parent was loaded, this would trigger a lazy load to load all of the Clients data when all you want is the IDs. Still, it's not terrible as it would only result in one DB call to load the clients.
If they are already loaded, there is a more succinct way to get the IDs:
List<int> ClientIds = Clients.Select(x => x.Id).ToList();
Otherwise, if you have business logic involving the Parent and Clients where-by you want to be more selective about when and how the data is loaded, it is better to leave the entity definition to just represent the data state and basic rules/logic about the data, and move selective business logic outside of the entity into a business logic container that scopes the DbContext and queries against the entities to fetch what it needs.
For instance, if the calling code went and did this:
var parent = _context.Parents.Single(x => x.ParentId == parentId);
parent.SomeMethod(); // which resulted in checking the Client IDs...
The simplest way to avoid the extra DB call is to ensure the related entities are eager loaded.
var parent = _context.Parents
.Include(x => x.Clients)
.Single(x => x.ParentId == parentId);
parent.SomeMethod(); // which resulted in checking the Client IDs...
The problem with this approach is that it will still load all details about all of the Clients, and you end up in a situation where you end up defaulting to eager loading everything all of the time because the code might call something like that SomeMethod() which expects to find related entity details. This is the use-case for leveraging lazy loading, but that does have the performance overheads of the ad-hoc DB hits and ensuring that the entity's DbContext is always available to perform the read if necessary.
Instead, if you move the logic out of the entity and into the caller or another container that can take the relevant details, so that this caller projects down the data it will need from the entities in an efficient query:
var parentDetails = _context.Parents
.Where(x => x.ParentId == parentId)
.Select(x => new
{
x.ParentId,
// other details from parent or related entities...
ClientIds = x.Clients.Select(c => c.Id).ToList()
}).Single();
// Do logic that SomeMethod() would have done here, or pass these
// loaded details to a method / service to do the work rather than
// embedding it in the Entity.
This doesn't load a Parent entity, but rather executes a query to load just the details about the parent and related entities that we need. In this example it is projected into an anonymous type to hold the information we can later consume, but if you are querying the data to send to a view then you can project it directly into a view model or DTO class to serialize and send.