NHibernate Gotchas

Although I love NHibernate we do seem to be hitting up against some of its problems these days, I've discussed some of them here but I wanted to document a few more.

Reference Data

You cannot easily map lists of essentially static data.

Dictionaries/Collections Containing Other Collections

We are currently restructuring our domain model massively, one of the main reasons is so that we can exploit the Party archetype pattern. We were able to redesign the DB at the same time as the domain so we didn't hit up against the normal set of issues that stop us redesigning our domain without changing the DB. However we did meet other issues.

For example in the party pattern a particular role (Customer) could be involved in multiple relationships. We need to have a relationship between the role and the relationship and it would seem sensible to have a dictionary keyed by PartyRelationshipKind (enum) where the value was an IList of PartyRoles.

The performance would be good, it'd be clean domain wise and we'd all be winners. Only slight problem is that it isn't supported, as is discussed in the forum entry. We ended up basically mapping the relationships into one big IList and then iterating through it when we wanted to get those that related to a particular PartyRelationshipKind.

Generics
Although NHibernate supports generics the support is limited, in particular you may come upon the following issues:

1. Mapping a generic class - Currently not supported. You can work around this by mapping a concrete class that inherits from the generic base class.
2. Mapping classes inheriting from a generic baseclass - A JIRA article can be found here, the solution is to map each of the subclasses seperately.

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