EF7 - IsLoaded property is always false on navigation-properties when using AsNoTracking()

[luca-domenichini]

Actual behaviour

Given 2 related entities Person and PersonDetail and executing a query with an Include() from Person to PersonDetail as follows, the corresponding navigation property has the IsLoaded value false

    var p = context.Persons
        .AsNoTracking()
        .Include(p => p.PersonDetail)
        .FirstAsync();

    Assert.True(context.Entry(p).Navigation(nameof(Person.PersonDetail)).IsLoaded); // this assertion fails!

Expected behaviour

The assertion should not fail, because the navigation property was loaded as part of the query.

Include provider and version information

EF Core version: 7.0.2
Database provider: Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.SqlServer and Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.InMemory
Target framework: .NET 6.0 / .NET 7.0
Operating system: Windows 10
IDE: Visual Studio 2022 17.4

Repro csproj: EF7AsNoTrackingBugTests.zip

[luca-domenichini]

Ok this is by design, since when loading with - no tracking - means exactly that the DbContext do not know anything about that entity.
Closing issue.

[ajcvickers]

@luca-domenichini Note that this will change in EF8 due to #10042

[luca-domenichini]

@ajcvickers from what I have read in #10042, I understand that EF8 will be able to lazy fetch navigations starting from an untracked entity. Does it means that the DbContext will populate the IsLoaded property too?
Thanks very much for your support!