R – NHibernate many-to-one mappings updating unchanged table

One to one mapping in nhibernate doesn't work the way you think it does. It's designed so that you have two classes, which when persisted to their corresponding tables have the same primary keys.

However you can make it work, but it's not pretty. I'll show you how then offer up some alternatives:

In your Transaction hbml:

<one-to-one name="Sequence" class="TransactionSequence" property-ref="Transaction"/>

In your Sequence html:

<many-to-one name="Transaction" class="Transaction" column="fk_Transaction_Sequence" />

This should do what you want it to do. Note the property-ref.

The next question you're going to post on is going to ask how you get lazy loading on one-to-one associations. The answer is, you can't... well you can, but it probably won't work. The problem is that you have your foreign key on the sequence table, which means that nhibernate has to hit the database to see if the target exists. Then you can try playing around with constrained="true/false" to see if you can persuade it to lazily load the one-to-one association.

All in all, it's going to result in a total waste of your time.

I suggest either:

1. Have two many-to-one associations.
2. Have a many-to-one association with a collection on the other end.

This will save you a lot of headaches in the long run.

To get a bidirectional association with a not-null foreign key column in the Details table you can add the suggested Owner property, a References(...).CanNotBeNull() mapping in the DetailsMap class, and make the Summary end inverse.

To avoid having two different foreign key columns for the two association directions, you can either specify the column names manually or name the properties in a way that gives the same column name for both directions. In this case you I suggest renaming the Details.Owner property to Details.Summary.

I made the Summary id generated by increment to avoid problems when inserting into the table since Summary currenty has no columns besides id.

Domain:

public class Detail
{
    public int id { get; protected set; }
    public string ItemName { get; set; }

    // Renamed to use same column name as specified in the mapping of Summary.Details
    public Summary Summary {get; set;} 
}

public class Summary
{
    public Summary()
    {
        Details = new List<Detail>();
    }

    public int id { get; protected set; }
    public IList<Detail> Details { get; protected set; }
}

Mapping:

public class DetailMap : ClassMap<Detail>
{
    public DetailMap()
    {
        Id(x => x.id)
            .GeneratedBy.Native();

        Map(x => x.ItemName)
            .CanNotBeNull();

        References<Summary>(x => x.Summary)
            // If you don't want to rename the property in Summary,
            // you can do this instead:
            // .TheColumnNameIs("Summary_id")
            .CanNotBeNull();
    }
}

public class SummaryMap : ClassMap<Summary>
{
    public SummaryMap()
    {
        Id(x => x.id)
            .GeneratedBy.Increment();

        HasMany<Detail>(x => x.Details)
            .IsInverse()
            .AsBag(); // Use bag instead of list to avoid index updating issues
    }
}