R – Why Fluent NHibernate vs. hbm XML files

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While this is a subjective question, as a new NHibernate user, I'm curious as to why one would choose Fluent vs traditional XML mapping.

From my standpoint, when I first worked with NHibernate, I used the Fluent interface, but ran into some roadblocks and had a hard time finding adequate documentation for the Fluent interface for anything beyond a 'toy app', so I learned to handle these via XML.

Over time, I realized I did most of my work on the XML side, and realized it was not as horrific as I thought it would be. So for me personally, it was a case of poor documentation and not seeing a significant savings in coding time.

That being said, there may be some huge advantage/disadvantage that I'm missing, and I'd really like to hear some opinions from folks who have more experience in working with these tools.

Best Answer

Compile-time safety and refactoring (renaming classes, properties) are one of the benefits you get from fluent mappings. Using one language (C# or VB.NET) to write mappings, program code and data access is another benefit.

Related Solutions

Fluent NHibernate: How to create one-to-many bidirectional mapping

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
    }
}

R – Fluent NHibernate question

What you're looking for is a of a set of elements, which in standard hbm mapping is:

<set name="Roles" table="UserRoles">
  <key column="UserID" />
  <element column="Role" />
</set>

For Fluent NHibernate you can map this like so:

HasMany<string>(x => x.Roles)
  .AsElement("Role");

You may need to also specify the key name using WithKeyColumn(string).

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Fluent NHibernate: How to create one-to-many bidirectional mapping

R – Fluent NHibernate question

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