database - LINQ to SQL for self-referencing tables?

Question

I have a self referencing Categories table. Each Category has a CategoryID, ParentCategoryID, CategoryName, etc. And each category can have any number of sub categories, and each of those sub categories can have any number of sub categories, and so and and so forth. So basically the tree can be X levels deep.

Then Products are associated to leaf (sub) Categories. Is there a way to get all the Products for any given Category (which would be all the products associated to all its leaf descendants) using LINQ to SQL?

This feels like a recursive problem. Is it better to used a Stored Procedure instead?

Answer 1

I don't think linq-to-sql has a good answer to this problem. Since you are using sql server 2005 you can use CTEs to do hierarchical queries. Either a stored procedure or an inline query (using DataContext.ExecuteQuery) will do the trick.