Entity Framework: I set the foreign key, SaveChanges then access the navigation property, but it doesn't load the related entity. Why not?

Question

I am using this Entity class with Entity Framework 5 Code First:

public class Survey
{
    [DatabaseGenerated(DatabaseGeneratedOption.Identity)]
    public i         


        

Answer 1

I expected the call to load the Client from the database because the foreign key exists. Why didn't it do that?

It didn't do that because you haven't asked it to. After the call to SaveChanges(), EF doesn't have the data in the referenced row and it won't make a potentially redundant database call to get it.

Calling db.Clients.Find(... tells EF to go and fetch the row from the database, which is why it returns the object.