Entity Framework 5: How to Outer Join Table Valued Function - entity-framework

Question

I'm attempting to outer join a table with an inline table valued function in my LINQ query, but I get a query compilation error at runtime:
"The query attempted to call 'OuterApply' over a nested query, but 'OuterApply' did not have the appropriate keys."
My linq statement looks like this:
var testQuery = (from accountBase in ViewContext.AccountBases
join advisorConcatRaw in ViewContext.UFN_AccountAdvisorsConcatenated_Get()
on accountBase.AccountId equals advisorConcatRaw.AccountId into advisorConcatOuter
from advisorConcat in advisorConcatOuter.DefaultIfEmpty()
select new
{
accountBase.AccountId,
advisorConcat.Advisors
}).ToList();
The function definition is as follows:
CREATE FUNCTION dbo.UFN_AccountAdvisorsConcatenated_Get()
RETURNS TABLE
AS
RETURN
SELECT AP.AccountId,
LEFT(AP.Advisors, LEN(AP.Advisors) - 1) AS Advisors
FROM ( SELECT DISTINCT
AP.AccountId,
( SELECT AP2.PropertyValue + ', '
FROM dbo.AccountProperty AP2 WITH (NOLOCK)
WHERE AP2.AccountId = AP.AccountId
AND AP2.AccountPropertyTypeId = 1 -- Advisor
FOR XML PATH('')) AS Advisors
FROM dbo.AccountProperty AP WITH (NOLOCK)) AP;
I can successfully perform the join directly in sql as follows:
SELECT ab.accountid,
advisorConcat.Advisors
FROM accountbase ab
LEFT OUTER JOIN dbo.Ufn_accountadvisorsconcatenated_get() advisorConcat
ON ab.accountid = advisorConcat.accountid
Does anyone have a working example of left outer joining an inline TVF to a table in LINQ to entities - or is this a known defect, etc? Many thanks.

Answer 1

Entity Framework needs to know what the primary key columns of the TVF results are to do a left join. Basically you need to create a fake table which has same schema as your TVF results and update TVF in model browser to return the new created table type instead of default complex type. You could refer to this answer to get more details.