Greg,
I finally solved the problem and here is what was done:
1. The problem was indeed related to the fact that the child column has trailing blanks at the end.
2. Not being able to modify the database, I overrode the property in the child record and trimmed its value in the getter.
3. This would not work either. After some experimenting, I discovered that the Entity.GetColumnValue() method does not go through the business object to get its value.
4. The Entity.GetColumnValue() being virtual, I overrode it in the abstract business object we use as a common base to all our business objects and extracted the value be reflection from the entity property itself.
When I do this, the loading of the child entities from the parent works just fine.
In my opinion, it is a bug that the Entity.GetColumnValue() method (at least the version accepting a column name) does not go through the business object property overrides to fetch its value.
I thank you very much for the help you provided and the time spent examining this problem.
Real