Proposal: Add overload to .Include for custom SQL query

Open
#11,296 1 comment 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
25/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
csharp, sql
Domain
database

Research direction

Start by reading the existing DbSet<>.FromSql and Include APIs and how they compose temporal queries. Define the supported custom SQL semantics for included entities, then add the overload and tests demonstrating the temporal User/Login example without the extra roundtrips.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

area-query

We currently use DbSet<>.FromSql to execute temporal queries on System-Versioned Temporal Tables, this works fine, but we can't use .Include in these queries, since you can't specify a SQL query for included entities. There is a workaround, which is to select all of the included entities beforehand using .FromSql so they are already in the EF Core model. However, this is quite cumbersome to do and involves a lot of roundtrips to the DB.

I would like to propose an enhancement that adds an overload on .Include that allows the SQL query to be provided, similar to .FromSql on DbSet<>.

Example:

var temporalQueryClause = " FOR SYSTEM_TIME AS OF '2015-09-01 T10:00:00.7230011'";
var users =
    db.Users
    .FromSql("SELECT * FROM [dbo].[User]" + temporalQueryClause)
    .Include(x => x.Login, "SELECT * FROM [dbo].[Login]" + temporalQueryClause);
Dominant language
C#
Stars
14.8k
Forks
3.4k
Avg merge
2d 5h
Merged PRs (30d)
134

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

More from dotnet/efcore

All issues in dotnet/efcore

Similar issues

More C# issues

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.