Explicit loading support

[divega]

Explicitly triggering the loading of associated data through a navigation can be handy especially when loading across aggregate bondaries or when working with stores that are not natively aggregate oriented. In previous versions of EF we had such methods as Load() and LoadAsync() on reference and collection property entries. We also had handy Query() methods that returned the query we would use to load the data so that filters could be composed over them before executing them. We should have the equivalent functionality in EF7.

[mjrousos]

+1; I've recently been porting some old EF6 code which used lazy loading and while I'm ok with not using lazy loading in the new world, some of the models are too large to entirely eagerly load. Instead, I have to explicitly load related objects as they're needed. Having first-class support for this with APIs like Load() and LoadAsync() would make porting easier.

[techyian]

+1 for this