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 by code


XML files have been NHibernate's default approach to mapping since its inception. It's a platform neutral, flexible and easily parsed format. The mapping syntax for Java's Hibernate is virtually identical to NHibernate's.

NHibernate also allows you to specify the mappings using nothing but code. This gives us a couple of advantages, since the mapping code gets intricately connected to the classes it should map. There is no risk of misspelled class or property names and you can use runtime logic to customize the mappings.

Getting ready

Complete the Getting ready instructions given at the beginning of this chapter.

The recipe uses the entity classes that we created in Eg.Core in the preceding recipes of this chapter. However, for convenience, NH4CookbookHelpers also provide the same class model and we will use that model here. Feel free to modify the code (changing the using statements) to use Eg.Core, if that suits you better. You may have to add a version property (integer) to...