The NHibernate 1.2 beta has been available for download since the end of September. Two of the big features are support for .NET generic collections and support for stored procedures. I decided to give these features a test drive and I posted my code here. (FYI, it's written using Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite and uses VSTS unit tests.)
The sample uses some very simple mappings: a Restaurant and a collection (“bag“) of Tables. And I'm using the “component“ mapping to represent the Address of the Restaurant.
First problem: “Test method NHibernate1Dot2Sample.UnitTests.RestaurantFixture.CreateRestaurant threw exception: NHibernate.InvalidProxyTypeException: Type 'NHibernate1Dot2Sample.Business.DomainModel.Restaurant' cannot be specified as proxy: method get_Name should be virtual.”
Now that's totally weird because the Name property is just a simple string.
Answer: add default-lazy=“true“ to the “hibernate-mapping“ element. I guess NHibernate was trying to lazy load the Name property but wasn't having any luck because it's a scalar.
Then I found a new mapping called “database-object“ that lets you create/drop objects in the database. This is a great new feature that's a lot better than the hack I've used to use -- adding SQL VIEW create scripts as named queries (”sql-query”) in the mapping files and then having a custom SchemaExport method that manually runs all those special queries using the ISession's DbConnection.
The following sample “database-object“ mapping creates a stored procedure called RestaurantTable_GetById:
My next issue was how to initialize dependent objects when querying with a stored procedure. For example, getting a restaurnt Table object by Id and initializing the table.Restaurant property. The answer is to use the “return-property/return-column“ mapping. In the sample below, the “return-property“ for the Restaurant property feeds the return-column into the key of the “many-to-one“ association from Table to Restaurant.
The following sample hooks the restaurant Table class to the RestaurantTable_GetById stored procedure:
-Ben