Retrieving an Entity Using ID with DbSet.Find

One task that developers perform frequently is retrieving an entity by providing its key value. For example, you may have access to the PersonId value of a Person in a variable named _personId and would like to retrieve the relevant person data.

Typically you would construct and execute a LINQ to Entities query. Here’s a query that uses the SingleOrDefault LINQ method to filter on PersonId when executing a query on context.People:

context.People.SingleOrDefault(p => p.PersonId == _personId)

Have you written that code so often that you finally wrote a wrapper method so you could pass the key value in and it would execute the LINQ query for you? Yeah, us too. Now DbSet has that shortcut built in with the Find method, which will return an entity whose key property matches the value passed into the method: