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 code


You can also configure NHibernate entirely in code. In this recipe, we'll show you how to do just that.

Getting ready

  1. Complete the steps in the Installing NHibernate recipe.

  2. Add a console application project to your solution called ConfigByCode.

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

  4. Install NHibernate to ConfigByCode project using NuGet Package Manager Console.

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

How to do it…

  1. Add an App.config file with this configuration:

    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
    <configuration>
      <connectionStrings>
        <add name="db" connectionString="Server=.\SQLEXPRESS; Database=NHCookbook; Trusted_Connection=SSPI" />
      </connectionStrings>
    </configuration>
  2. In Program.cs, add the following using statements:

    using NHibernate.Cfg;
    using NHibernate.Dialect;
  3. In your Main function, add the following code to configure NHibernate:

    var nhConfig = new Configuration().DataBaseIntegration(db =>
    {
      db.Dialect<MsSql2012Dialect>();
      db.ConnectionStringName = "db";
      db.BatchSize = 100;
    });
    var sessionFactory = nhConfig.BuildSessionFactory();
    Console.WriteLine("NHibernate Configured!");
    Console.ReadKey();
  4. Build and run your application. You should see the text NHibernate Configured!

How it works…

In this recipe, we create an NHibernate configuration using methods in the NHibernate.Cfg namespace. These methods offer full type safety and improved discoverability over code configurations in the previous version of NHibernate.

We specify dialect, connection.connection_string_name, and adonet.batch_size with the DatabaseIntegration method. Finally, we build a session factory using the BuildSessionFactory method.

There's more...

Notice that we are still referencing the db connection string defined in our App.config file. If we wanted to eliminate the App.config file entirely, we could hardcode the connection string with this code:

db.ConnectionString = @"Connection string here...";

This, however, is completely inflexible, and will require a full recompile and redeployment for even a minor configuration change.

See also

  • Configuring NHibernate with App.config or Web.config

  • Configuring NHibernate with XML

  • Configuring NHibernate with Fluent NHibernate