R – Can nhibernate/orm support eav

Let's say you have a collection of Car objects (database rows), and each Car has a collection of Wheel objects (also rows). In other words, Car → Wheel is a 1-to-many relationship.

Now, let's say you need to iterate through all the cars, and for each one, print out a list of the wheels. The naive O/R implementation would do the following:

SELECT * FROM Cars;

And then for each Car:

SELECT * FROM Wheel WHERE CarId = ?

In other words, you have one select for the Cars, and then N additional selects, where N is the total number of cars.

Alternatively, one could get all wheels and perform the lookups in memory:

SELECT * FROM Wheel

This reduces the number of round-trips to the database from N+1 to 2. Most ORM tools give you several ways to prevent N+1 selects.

Reference: Java Persistence with Hibernate, chapter 13.

Take a look at the new Mapping By Code functionality of NH 3.2. It should make it easy to create new table definitions at runtime. In contrast to Fluent, you don't need to write a mapping class, you just can add new classes in for loops:

// lookup all dynamic tables in the database using SQL or SMO or whatever
var dynamicTables = GetDynamicTables();

// map all dynamic tables
foreach(var table in dynamicTables)
{
  mapper.Class<MyGenericEntity>(ca =>
  {
      // use an entity name to distinguish the mappings.
      ca.EntityName(table.Name);
      ca.Id(x => x.Id, map =>
      {
          map.Column("Id");
          map.Generator(Generators.HighLow, gmap => gmap.Params(new { max_low = 100 }));
      });
      // map properties, using what ever is required: if's, for's ...
      ca.Property(x => x.Something, map => map.Length(150));
  });
}

Using the entity name you can store and load the entities to and from different tables, even if they are mapped as the same entity class. It is like Duck Typing With NHibernate..

Believe me, it won't be easy. If you are interested in a big challenge which impresses every NH expert, just go for it. If you just want to get it working you should choose a more classic way: create a static database model which is able to store dynamic data in a generic way (say: name value pairs).