Book Image

NHibernate 4.x Cookbook - Second Edition

By : Gunnar Liljas, Alexander Zaytsev, Jason Dentler
Book Image

NHibernate 4.x Cookbook - Second Edition

By: Gunnar Liljas, Alexander Zaytsev, Jason Dentler

Overview of this book

NHibernate is a mature, flexible, scalable, and feature-complete open source project for data access. Although it sounds like an easy task to build and maintain database applications, it can be challenging to get beyond the basics and develop applications that meet your needs perfectly. NHibernate allows you to use plain SQL and stored procedures less and keep focus on your application logic instead. Learning the best practices for a NHibernate-based application will help you avoid problems and ensure that your project is a success. The book will take you from the absolute basics of NHibernate through to its most advanced features, showing you how to take full advantage of each concept to quickly create amazing database applications. You will learn several techniques for each of the four core NHibernate tasks—configuration, mapping, session and transaction management, and querying—and which techniques fit best with various types of applications. In short, you will be able to build an application using NHibernate by the end of the book. You will also learn how to best implement enterprise application architecture patterns using NHibernate, leading to clean, easy-to-understand code and increased productivity. In addition to new features, you will learn creative ways to extend the NHibernate core, as well as gaining techniques to work with the NHibernate search, shards, spatial, envers, and validation projects.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
NHibernate 4.x Cookbook Second Edition
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
Index

Configuring NHibernate with App.config or Web.config


Another common method for configuring NHibernate uses a .NET configuration file. In this recipe, we will show you how to configure NHibernate using App.config or Web.config files, to provide an identical configuration to the previous recipe.

Getting ready

  1. Complete the steps in the Installing NHibernate recipe.

  2. Add a console application project named ConfigByAppConfig to your solution.

  3. Set it as the Startup project for your solution.

  4. Install NHibernate to the ConfigByAppConfig project using the NuGet Package Manager Console.

  5. In ConfigByAppConfig, add a reference to the Eg.Core project.

  6. Add an App.config file to your project.

How to do it…

  1. Open the App.config file.

  2. Declare a section for the NHibernate configuration, as shown here:

    <configSections>
      <section name="hibernate-configuration" type="NHibernate.Cfg.ConfigurationSectionHandler, 
    NHibernate" />
    </configSections>
  3. Add a connectionStrings section with a connection string:

    <connectionStrings>
      <add name="db" connectionString="Server=.\SQLEXPRESS; Database=NHCookbook; Trusted_Connection=SSPI"/>
    </connectionStrings>
  4. Add your hibernate-configuration section:

    <hibernate-configuration xmlns="urn:nhibernate-configuration-2.2">
      <session-factory>
        <property name="dialect">
          NHibernate.Dialect.MsSql2008Dialect, NHibernate
        </property>
        <property name="connection.connection_string_name">
          db
        </property>
        <property name="adonet.batch_size">
          100
        </property>
      </session-factory>
    </hibernate-configuration>
  5. Your completed App.config file should look similar to this:

    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
    <configuration>
      <configSections>
        <section name="hibernate-configuration" type="NHibernate.Cfg.ConfigurationSectionHandler, 
          NHibernate" />
      </configSections>
      <connectionStrings>
        <add name="db" connectionString="Server=.\SQLEXPRESS; Database=NHCookbook; Trusted_Connection=SSPI" />
      </connectionStrings>
    <hibernate-configuration xmlns="urn:nhibernate-configuration-2.2">
      <session-factory>
        <property name="dialect">
          NHibernate.Dialect.MsSql2008Dialect, NHibernate
        </property>
        <property name="connection.connection_string_name">
          db
        </property>
        <property name="adonet.batch_size">
          100
        </property>
      </session-factory>
    </hibernate-configuration>
    </configuration>
  6. Open Program.cs and add using NHibernate.Cfg; to the beginning of the file.

  7. In the Main method, add the following code to configure NHibernate:

    var nhConfig = new Configuration().Configure();
    var sessionFactory = nhConfig.BuildSessionFactory();
    Console.WriteLine("NHibernate Configured!");
    Console.ReadKey();
  8. Build and run your application. You will see the text NHibernate Configured!

How it works…

This recipe works in the same way as the previous recipe. However, in this recipe, we have moved the hibernate-configuration element from the hibernate.cfg.xml file to App.config. The connection.connection_string_name property references our connection string named db. We can name the connection string anything we like, as long as this property matches the connection string's name.

There's more…

An ASP.NET application's Web.config uses the common .NET framework configuration platform and has the same structure as App.config. You can therefore use the same technique to configure NHibernate in a web application.

See also

  • Configuring NHibernate with hibernate.cfg.xml

  • Configuring NHibernate with code

  • Configuring NHibernate with Fluent NHibernate