Use lambda expression as parameter for Include method in Entity Framework

One thing I find it very surprising with Entity Framework is that there is no overloaded Include method in DbQuery class that takes lambda expression as its parameter. Imagining that you want to load Customer's addresses with Customers, you have to do something like this:

context.Customer.Include("CustomerAddress")

There are a few drawbacks with this. First of all, it is not very refactor friend. Secondly there is no support from Intellisense. 

It would be great if you can write like this:

context.Customer.Include(m => m.CustomerAddress)

Well, as it turns out it is not very hard to accomplish that. We can create a extension method also called Include for DbQuery class with some help from Expression class as bellow:

public static class QueryHelper
    {
        private static string GetPath<T>(Expression<Func<T, object>> memberExpression)
        {
            var bodyString = memberExpression.Body.ToString();
            string path = bodyString.Remove(0, memberExpression.Parameters[0].Name.Length + 1);
            return path;
        }
 
        public static DbQuery<T> Include<T>(this DbQuery<T> query, Expression<Func<T, object>> memberExpression)
        {
            string includePath = GetPath<T>(memberExpression);
            return query.Include(includePath);
        }
    }