Hi,

If I request a collection and do a prefetch for each item and all of the items in the collection reference the same entity, is there one copy of the related entity in memory for each item or do they all reference the same instance?

Cheers, Ian.

They don't reference the same entity, unless you use a Context to keep one instance only in memory.

So if I do this...

            Context context = new Context();

            adapter.FetchEntity(accountEntity, path2, context);

Is that all it takes to make sure every item returned is only loaded once?

Yep. But remember to include the subPath. For example:

Context c = new Context();
EntityCollection<OrderEntity> orders = new EntityCollection<OrderEntity>();

IPrefetchPath2 path = new PrefetchPath2((int) EntityType.OrderEntity);
path.Add(OrderEntity.PrefetchPathCustomer);

IRelationPredicateBucket filter = new RelationPredicateBucket();
filter.PredicateExpression.Add(OrderFields.CustomerId == "ALFKI");

c.Add(orders);

using (DataAccessAdapter adapter = new DataAccessAdapter())
{
    adapter.FetchEntityCollection(orders, filter, path);
}

Here the customer 'ALFKI' associated to all these orders is the same instance.