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

Mapping a class with XML


The suggested first step in any new NHibernate application is mapping the model. The mapping describes how objects O should be retrieved and stored as relational data R in the database. In the simplest scenarios, this is merely a straightforward mapping between classes in the code and tables in the database. Still, the structure of the code or of the database will usually require careful mapping in order to get correct behavior and optimal performance.

Note

Most of the recipes in this chapter utilize a custom library called NH4CookbookHelpers, which makes it possible to visualize the results and behaviors of the mappings described. For convenience, we use NuGet to reference this library, but feel free to download the source code from https://github.com/gliljas/NH4CookbookHelpers if you want to modify its functionality or just see how it works.

Getting ready

Before we begin mapping, let's get our Visual Studio solution set up. Follow these steps to set up your solution...