Hi,
I am using NHibernate (version 1.2.1) for the first time so I wrote a simple test application (an ASP.NET project) that uses it. In my database I have two tables: Persons and Categories. Each person gets one category, seems easy enough.
| Persons | | Categories |
|--------------| |--------------|
| Id (PK) | | Id (PK) |
| Firstname | | CategoryName |
| Lastname | | CreatedTime |
| CategoryId | | UpdatedTime |
| CreatedTime | | Deleted |
| UpdatedTime |
| Deleted |
The Id, CreatedTime, UpdatedTime and Deleted attributes are a convention I use in all my tables, so I have tried to bring this fact into an additional abstraction layer. I have a project DatabaseFramework which has three important classes:
Entity: an abstract class that defines these four properties. All 'entity objects' (in this case Person and Category) must inherit Entity.
IEntityManager: a generic interface (type parameter as Entity) that defines methods like Load, Insert, Update, etc.
NHibernateEntityManager: an implementation of this interface using NHibernate to do the loading, saving, etc.
Now, the Person and Category classes are straightforward, they just define the attributes of the tables of course (keeping in mind that four of them are in the base Entity class).
Since the Persons table is related to the Categories table via the CategoryId attribute, the Person class has a Category
property that holds the related category. However, in my webpage, I will also need the name of this category (CategoryName), for databinding purposes for example. So I created an additional
property CategoryName that returns the CategoryName
property of the current Category
property, or an empty string if the Category is null:
Namespace Database
Public Class Person
Inherits DatabaseFramework.Entity
Public Overridable
Property Firstname As String
Public Overridable
Property Lastname As String
Public Overridable
Property Category As Category
Public Overridable ReadOnly
Property CategoryName As String
Get
Return If(Me.Category Is Nothing, _
String.Empty, _
Me.Category.CategoryName)
End Get
End
Property
End Class
End Namespace
I am mapping the Person class using this mapping file. The many-to-one relation was suggested by Yads in another thread:
<id name="Id" column="Id" type="int" unsaved-value="0">
<generator class="identity" />
</id>
<property name="CreatedTime" type="DateTime" not-null="true" />
<property name="UpdatedTime" type="DateTime" not-null="true" />
<property name="Deleted" type="Boolean" not-null="true" />
<property name="Firstname" type="String" />
<property name="Lastname" type="String" />
<many-to-one name="Category" column="CategoryId" class="NHibernateWebTest.Database.Category, NHibernateWebTest" />
(I can't get it to show the root node, this forum hides it, I don't know how to escape the html-like tags...)
The final important detail is the Load method of the NHibernateEntityManager implementation. (This is in C# as it's in a different project, sorry about that).
I simply open a new ISession (ISessionFactory.OpenSession) in the GetSession method and then use that to fill an EntityCollection(Of TEntity) which is just a collection inheriting System.Collections.ObjectModel.Collection(Of T).
public virtual EntityCollection< TEntity Load()
{
using (ISession session = this.GetSession())
{
var entities = session
.CreateCriteria(typeof (TEntity))
.Add(Expression.Eq("Deleted", false))
.List< TEntity ();
return new EntityCollection< TEntity (entities);
}
}
(Again, I can't get it to format the code correctly, it hides the generic type parameters, probably because it reads the angled symbols as a HTML tag..? If you know how to let me do that, let me know!)
Now, the idea of this Load method is that I get a fully functional collection of Persons, all their properties set to the correct values (including the Category
property, and thus, the CategoryName
property should return the correct name).
However, it seems that is not the case. When I try to data-bind the result of this Load method to a GridView in ASP.NET, it tells me this:
Property accessor 'CategoryName' on object 'NHibernateWebTest.Database.Person' threw the following exception:'Could not initialize proxy - the owning Session was closed.'
The exception occurs on the DataBind method call here:
public virtual void LoadGrid()
{
if (this.Grid == null) return;
this.Grid.DataSource = this.Manager.Load();
this.Grid.DataBind();
}
Well, of course the session is closed, I closed it via the using block. Isn't that the correct approach, should I keep the session open? And for how long? Can I close it after the DataBind method has been run?
In each case, I'd really like my Load method to just return a functional collection of items. It seems to me that it is now only getting the Category when it is required (eg, when the GridView wants to read the CategoryName, which wants to read the Category property), but at that time the session is closed. Is that reasoning correct?
How do I stop this behavior? Or shouldn't I? And what should I do otherwise?
Thanks!
