WCF Data Contract and Reference Entity Data?

Question

Soliciting feedback/options/comments regarding a \"best\" pattern to use for reference data in my services.

What do I mean by reference data?

Let\'s use Northwin

Answer 1

It seems like a complicated solution to me. Why not just have a customer id field in the OrderDTO class and then let the application decide at runtime whether it needs the customer data. Since it has the customer id it can pull the data down when it so decides.