DevForce 2010: Life without joins?

In http://drc.ideablade.com/xwiki/bin/view/Documentation/linq-join-examples - this documentation page it is suggested that we should be able to avoid joins

to create a more natural looking request. I have run into a case where I don't

see how to do this without joins.

Consider your example of customers and orders. Say I wanted to create a list

of orders and their corresponding sales region where the sales region was a

property of customer.

So, the join syntax would be

query = from o in manager.Orders

join c in manager.Customers on o.CustomerId = c.Id

join sr in manager.SalesRegions on c.SalesRegionId = sr.Id

select new { OrderNumber = o.Number, SalesRegion = sr.Name };

results = query.ToList()

From the examples in your documentation I wasn't able to see how to create a query that projects from more than one entity in the join,

so I was in the process of telling you how it could not be done and I found out how.... So rather than throwing this email away, I'll post

what I think is a solution and maybe someone can tell me if I'm on the right track.

With method chaining,

query = manager.SalesRegions

.SelectMany(sr => sr.Customers)

.SelectMany(c => c.Orders)

.Select(o => new {OrderNumber = o.Number,

SalesRegion = o.Customer.SalesRegion.Name});