What is lazy initialization and why is it useful?

Question

What is lazy initialization of objects? How do you do that and what are the advantages?

Answer 1

As what I have understood about lazy init so far, is that the program does not load/request all data a once. It waits for the use of it before requesting it from eg. a SQL-server.

If you have a database with a large table joined with a large amount of subtables and you dont require the details joined from the other tabels unless going into "edit" or "view details", then Lazy Init. will help the application to go faster and first "lazy load" the detailsdata upon needed.

In SQL or LINQ you can set this "setting" on your database model pr. dataelement.

Hope this makes any sense to your question?

A webclient (eg. a browser) does the same thing. The images are "lazy loaded" after the HTML and AJAX is also a "sort of lazy init" if used right.