NHibernate join 2 tables and project to DTO with collection - nhibernate

Question

I am trying to join 2 tables, and project directly to DTOs (NHibernate 5).
I have following entities:
public class Person {
public Guid Id {get;set;}
public string Name {get;set;}
}
public class Car {
public Guid Id {get;set;}
public string Brand {get;set;}
public Person Owner {get;set;}
}
as we see, there is just reference from Car to Person (car knows its owner), and this is ok in my whole project.
However, there is one place, where I need to query all Persons, and make each person with collection of owned cars.
I created such DTOs:
public class PersonDto {
public Guid Id {get;set;}
public string Name {get;set;}
public IList<CarDto> {get;set;}
}
public class CarDto {
public Guid Id {get;set;}
public string Brand {get;set;}
}
it is kind of present the data linked together upside-down.
This task seems trivial using SQL or LINQ (GroupJoin) however I found it extremly hard to do in NH, since GroupJoin is not implemented in NH.
Can you please help me how to solve above issue?

Answer 1

Just add a Car collection to the existing Person entity and mark the collection inverse. Collections in NHibernate are lazy by default, so when you query Person, it won't read the cars from the DB, until you start iterating them. In other words adding the Car collection won't affect the way your code works.
When you want to efficiently query persons together with cars, force NH to do a join
.QueryOver<Person>.Fetch(person => person.Cars).Eager

Answer 2

I'd like to answer my own question. Thanks Rafal Rutkowski for his input.
To get data that has association in only 1 direction, we need to introduce a new data model, and then, manually convert result to our entities. I hope following example is best possible answer:
1) create such data model to store NH response:
private class PersonCarModelDto
{
public Guid PersonId { get; set; }
public string PersonName { get; set; }
public Guid CarId { get; set; }
public string CarBrand { get; set; }
}
2) create such a model to store hierarchical data as output:
private class PersonModel
{
public Guid Id { get; set; }
public string Name { get; set; }
public IList<CarModel> Cars { get; set; }
}
private class CarModel
{
public Guid Id { get; set; }
public string Brand { get; set; }
}
3) now the NH query:
Person personAlias = null;
Car carAlias = null;
PersonCarModelDto resultAlias = null;
var response = GetCurrentSession().QueryOver<Car>(() => carAlias) // notice we are going from from 'downside' entity to 'up'
.Right.JoinAlias(c => c.Owner, () => personAlias) // notice Right join here, to have also Persons without any car
.SelectList(list => list
.Select(() => personAlias.Id).WithAlias(() => resultAlias.PersonId)
.Select(() => personAlias.Name).WithAlias(() => resultAlias.PersonName)
.Select(() => carAlias.Id).WithAlias(() => resultAlias.CarId)
.Select(() => carAlias.Brand).WithAlias(() => resultAlias.CarBrand)
.TransformUsing(Transformers.AliasToBean<PersonCarModelDto>())
.List<PersonCarModelDto>()
;
4) now we have flat data as a list of PersonCarModelDto, but we want to make output model:
var modelResult = response.GroupBy(p => p.PersonId)
.Select(x => new PersonModel
{
Id = x.Key,
Name = x.Select(y => y.PersonName).First(), // First() because each PersonName in that group is the same
Cars = x.Select(y => new CarModel
{
Id = y.CarId,
Name = y.CarBrand
})
.ToList()
})
.ToList()
;
Conclusions:
the problem is much easier to solve having bidirectional associations
if for some reason, you don't want bidirectional associations, use this technique
this approach is also useful if your entities has a lot of other properties, but for some reason you need just a small part of them
(optimiziation of data returned for DB)