title: WPF, EF4, and relations
body: <p>Relations is probably the wrong word to use, but Data tables are what I have used before. I have EF4 pulling from a SQL database. Tables like Customer, Company, Department; things that usually go into Comboboxes for selection. I am holding them in static lists (only needs to populate on app startup), and I have a few comboboxes itemssource bound to them, which makes setting "relating" a specific selection easy by binding the selected item from the ViewModel.</p>
  
  <p>My problem is, in a few places I just need a the name associated with an ID in a datagrid for display only. A couple hundred rows with a CompanyId that needs to be a CompanyName. I am concerned about performance here. I could use the DB FK's to get the names during the lookup, but thats seems like a waste since I have them all in static lists. I also don't know if Lazy loading would mean they get looked up during data binding, or during the initial query.</p>
  
  <p>What is the best solution here? Can you make a wpf value converter using static lists? Should I perform a foreach on the data after getting it, and looking the values in the static list, storing the Name in the object?</p>