Relation many-to-one retrieved from custom cache - nhibernate

Question

It's more like theoretical question.
I have one table to hold dictionary items, and the next one for hold Users data.
User table contains a lot reference collumns of type many to one indicated on dictionary item table. It's looks like:
public class User
{
public int Id;
public Dictionary Status;
public Dictionary Type;
public Dictionary OrganizationUnit;
......
}
I want retrieve all dictionary on startup of aplication, and then when i retrieved user and invoke reference property to dictionary the dictionary object should be taken from cache.
I know i can use a 2nd level cache in this scenario, but i'm interested about other solution. Is there any?
It's posible to make my custom type and said that: use my custom cache to retrieved value of dictionary??

Answer 1

Across multiple session the second level cache is the best answer, the only other solutions to populate objects from a cache without using second level cache i can think of would be to use an onLoad interceptor (and simply leave your dictionaries unmapped) or do it manually somewhere in your application.
But why don't you want to use the seocondlevel cache? If your views on caching is very different from the storages there are providers for in hibernate it is possible for you to implement your own provider?

Answer 2

Why not store it in the session? Just pull the record set one time and push it into session and retrieve it each time you want it. I do something similar for other stuff and I believe my method should work for you. In my code I have a session manager that I call directly from any piece of code needs the session values. I choose this method since I can query the results and I can manipulate the storage and retrieval methods. When relying on NHibernate to do the Caching for me, I don't have the granularity of control to cause specific record sets to only be available to specific sessions. I also find that NHibernate is not as efficient as using the session directly. When profiling the CPU and memory usage I find that this method is faster and uses a little less memory. If you want to do it on a site level instead of session, look into HttpContext.Current.Cache.
The following example works perfectly for storing and retrieving record sets:
// Set the session
SessionManager.User = (Some code to pull the user record with relationships. Set the fetch mode to eager for each relationship else you will just have broken references.)
// Get the session
User myUser = SessionManager.User;
public static class SessionManager
{
public static User User
{
get { return GetSession("MySessionUser") as User; }
set { SetSession("MySessionUser", value); }
}
private static object GetSession(string key)
{
// Fix Null reference error
if (System.Web.HttpContext.Current == null || System.Web.HttpContext.Current.Session == null)
{
return null;
}
else
{
return System.Web.HttpContext.Current.Session[key];
}
}
private static void SetSession(string key, object valueIn)
{
// Fix null reference error
if (System.Web.HttpContext.Current.Session[key] == null)
{
System.Web.HttpContext.Current.Session.Add(key, valueIn);
}
else
{
System.Web.HttpContext.Current.Session[key] = valueIn;
}
}
}