Hello World with NHibernate in C#

Make Code 39 Extended in C# Hello World with NHibernate

to the database using NHibernate. To complete the program, you will next add some code that will load the Employee from the database, and print our Hello World message. Let s add that code now.

Let s start by adding code that can retrieve all Employees from the database in alphabetical order. Type the code in listing 2.3 below the previous OpenSession() function.

static void LoadEmployeesFromDatabase() { using (ISession session = OpenSession()) { IQuery query = session.CreateQuery( "from Employee as emp order by emp.name asc"); IList<Employee> foundEmployees = query.List<Employee>(); Console.WriteLine("\n{0} employees found:", foundEmployees.Count); foreach( Employee employee in foundEmployees ) Console.WriteLine(employee.SayHello()); } }

The literal string "from Employee as emp order by emp.name asc" is an NHibernate query, expressed in NHibernate s own object-oriented Hibernate Query Language (HQL). This query is internally translated into the following SQL when query.List() is called:

If you ve never used an ORM tool like NHibernate before, you were probably expecting to see the SQL statements somewhere in the code or metadata. They aren t there. All SQL is generated at runtime (at startup, where possible). So far, you ve defined the Employee entity, set up the database, and written code to create a new Employee and later retrieve it from the Employee table. NHibernate has barely entered the picture yet. Next, you ll write some XML to tell NHibernate about the Employee entity and how you want Employees saved in the database.

In order for NHibernate to do its magic in any of the code so far, it first needs more information about how the Employee class should be made persistent. This information is usually provided in an XML mapping document. The mapping document defines, among other things, how properties of the Employee class map to columns of the Employees table. Let s look at the mapping document in listing 2.4.

Hello NHibernate!

< xml version="1.0" > <hibernate-mapping xmlns="urn:nhibernate-mapping-2.2" auto-import="true"> <class name="HelloNHibernate.Employee, HelloNHibernate" lazy="false"> <id name="id" access="field"> <generator class="native" /> </id> <property name="name" access="field" column="name"/> <many-to-one access="field" name="manager" column="manager" cascade="all"/> </class> </hibernate-mapping>

To add this mapping document to your solution, do the following:

2 3 4

Right-click your HelloNHibernate project in the Solution Explorer, and select Add > New Item. Select the XML document type, and name it Employee.hbm.xml. Click OK. Now highlight the XML file in Solution Explorer and look for the Build Action property in the Properties pane. Change it from Content to Embedded Resource. This is an important step that you shouldn t miss, because it allows NHibernate to easily find the mapping information. Now copy the XML in listing 2.4 into your Employee.hbm.xml file.

The mapping document you ve just created tells NHibernate that the Employee class is to be persisted to the Employees table, that the id field maps to a column named id, that the name field maps to a column named name, and that the manager property is an association with many-to-one multiplicity that maps to a column named ManagerId. (Don t worry about the other details for now.) As you can see, the XML document isn t difficult to understand. You can easily write and maintain it by hand. In chapter 3, we discuss a way to generate the XML file from comments embedded in the source code. Whichever method you choose, NHibernate has enough information to completely generate all the SQL statements needed to insert, update, delete, and retrieve instances of the Employee class. You no longer need to write these SQL statements by hand.

NHibernate has sensible defaults that minimize typing and a mature document type definition that can be used for auto-completion or validation in editors, including Visual Studio. You can even automatically generate metadata with various tools.