I have an object Topic which is a self-related hierarchy where the child Topics are defined as
public class Topic : Entity {
public ISet<Topic> ChildTopics { get; internal set; }
public Topic ParentTopic { get; set; }
...
}
I'm writing a form (MVC3) to produce a drop-down list (Html.DropDownListFor) of the first-level topics (theoretically this will eventually AJAX into a second drop-down for second-level topics), but when it goes to save, it produces the ever-popular "Cannot cast..." exception (see question title).
The usual cause of this is that you used List or Set instead of IList or ISet, but I am using ISet, and it specifically says it can't cast to ISet.
The reason this is a set is because you wouldn't want a Topic being a child of another Topic more than once. The table mapping create by Fluent NH automapping is correct with this override:
mapping.HasMany<Topic>(t => t.ChildTopics).AsSet().Inverse().KeyColumn("TopicId");
In my project, as of NHibernate 3.2.0.400, this error still occurs if I use System.Collections.Generic.ISet<T> instead of Iesi.Collections.Generic.ISet<T>. Simply changing the references around is minimal work and solves the problem.
Related
Contrived example, but let's say I have a these entities:
public class Root
{
public virtual Customer Customer { get; set; }
}
public class Customer
{
public virtual CustomerData Data { get; set; }
}
public class CustomerData
{
public virtual string FooName { get; set; }
}
Now, let's say I want to create a filter for Root based on the value of FooName. Intuitively, I tried this in my FooMap class. Using Fluent mappings.
ApplyFilter("FooNameFilter", "Customer.Data.FooName in (:argument)");
This doesn't work. A SqlClient.SqlException is thrown stating The multi-part identifier "Customer.Data.FooName" could not be bound.
Is there a way to make filters work this way, or am I forced to move that logic into all Query<Root>()s instead?
What could be working, is to move the filter to the CustomerData object if possible, or to create "more sophisticated SQL condition" applied on the Customer mapping. But it is about pure SQL, no references. How do the filters work?
The filters are the same as the where clause, but could be adjusted in a runtime. The extract from documentation 18.1. NHibernate filters
NHibernate adds the ability to pre-define filter criteria and attach
those filters at both a class and a collection level. A filter
criteria is the ability to define a restriction clause very similiar
to the existing "where" attribute available on the class and various
collection elements. Except these filter conditions can be
parameterized. The application can then make the decision at runtime
whether given filters should be enabled and what their parameter
values should be. Filters can be used like database views, but
parameterized inside the application.
The definition of the where:
where (optional) specify an arbitrary SQL WHERE condition to be used when retrieving objects of this class
Other words, these settings act as "add on" to our mapping. They are extending it (both where and filter) with more SQL balast. The filter could be shared among many mappings and applied to all queries inside one session, but it must target the column:
condition=":myFilterParam = MY_FILTERED_COLUMN"
I have a domain model that includes something like this:
public class Customer : EntityBase<Customer>, IAggregateRoot
{
public IList<Comment> Comments { get; set; }
}
public class Comment : EntityBase<Comment>
{
public User CreatedBy { get; set; }
public bool Private { get; set; }
}
I have a service layer through which I retrieve these entities, and among the arguments passed to that service layer is who the requesting user is.
What I'd like to do is be able to construct a DetachedCriteria in the service layer that would limit the Comment items returned for a given customer so the user isn't shown any comments that don't belong to them and are marked private.
I tried doing something like this:
criteria.CreateCriteria("Comments")
.Add(Restrictions.Or(Restrictions.Eq("Private", false),
Restrictions.And(Restrictions.Eq("Private", true),
Restrictions.Eq("CreatedBy.Id", requestingUser.Id))));
But this doesn't flow through to the lazy-loaded comments.
I'd prefer not to use a filter because that would require either interacting with the session (which isn't currently exposed to the service layer) or forcing my repository to know about user context (which seems like too much logic in what should be a dumb layer). The filter is a dirty solution for other reasons, too -- the logic that determines what is visible and what isn't is more detailed than just a private flag.
I don't want to use LINQ in the service layer to filter the collection because doing so would blow the whole lazy loading benefit in a really bad way. Lists of customers where the comments aren't relevant would cause a storm of database calls that would be very slow. I'd rather not use LINQ in my presentation layer (an MVC app) because it seems like the wrong place for it.
Any ideas whether this is possible using the DetachedCriteria? Any other ways to accomplish this?
Having the entity itself expose a different set of values for a collection property based on some external value does not seem correct to me.
This would be better handled, either as a call to your repository service directly, or via the entity itself, by creating a method to do this specifically.
To fit in best with your current model though, I would have the call that you currently make to get the the entities return a viewmodel rather than just the entities;
public class PostForUser
{
public Post Post {get; set;}
public User User {get; set;}
public IList<Comment> Comments}
}
And then in your service method (I am making some guesses here)
public PostForUser GetPost(int postId, User requestingUser){
...
}
You would then create and populate the PostForUser view model in the most efficient way, perhaps by the detached criteria, or by a single query and a DistinctRootEntity Transformer (you can leave the actual comments property to lazy load, as you probably won't use it)
I'm just trying to get my head around nHibernate and have a query. When setting up the mappings file (with Fluent or regular .hbm.xml files) you specify relationships (bags; one-to-many, etc) and sub-types - the idea being (I believe) is that when you fetch an object it also fetches and matching data. My question is can I programmatically tell my query to ignore that relationship?
So, below, there is a Foo class with a list of Bar objects. Within the mappings file this would be a one-to-many relationship and sometimes I want to retrieve a Foo with all Bars BUT sometimes I want to just retrieve the Foo object without the Bar, for performance reasons. How can I do this?
public class Foo { public int Id { get; set; } public List<Bar> { get; set; } }
public class Bar { public int Id { get; set; }
Cheers
The relationship shouldn't be loaded automatically unless you turn off Lazy Loading or specify it to be eager loaded in the query.
Edit:
To answer your questions in the comment below.
1) It's done as part of the query. An basic example using QueryOver in NHibernate 3.0 would look something like:
var result = Session.QueryOver()
.Fetch(x => x.Category).Eager
.Where(x => x.Price > 10)
.List();
I think with ICriteria it's "SetFetchMode("Category", FetchMode.Eager)"
2) If you turn off lazy-loading on the mapping for an object, it will effectively always be eager loaded. Tho I suggest you eager load on a query-by-query basis to avoid the possibility of having a massive chain of data loaded, or loading data you don't actually need.
I started using NHibernate today, but I cannot figure out how I setup a simple relation between two tables. I don't really know what it's called, it could be one-to-many or foreign key relation (I'm not that into database design and the terms used), but here's a very simple example.
I have a table Product with attributes Id (PK), ProductName and CategoryId. Then I have a table Categories with attributes Id (PK) and CategoryName.
I created these classes:
public class Product
{
public virtual int Id { get; set; }
public virtual string ProductName { get; set; }
public virtual int CategoryId { get; set; }
public virtual Category Category { get; set; }
public virtual string CategoryName
{
get { return this.Category == null ? String.Empty : this.Category.CategoryName; }
}
}
public class Category
{
public virtual int Id { get; set; }
public virtual string CategoryName { get; set; }
}
In other words, I simply want the Product to store to which category it belongs (via the CategoryId attribute which points to an Id in the Categories table). I don't need the Category class to hold a list of related Products, if that makes it any simpler.
To make it even more clear what I'm after, this is the SQL that I'm expecting:
SELECT Products.*, Categories.*
FROM Products INNER JOIN Categories ON Products.CategoryId = Categories.Id
at least that's what I think it should be (again, I'm not that good at database design or queries).
I can't figure out which kind of mapping I need for this. I suppose I need to map it in the Product.hbm.xml file. But do I map the CategoryId as well? And how do I map the Category property?
It seems like I would need a 'one-to-many' relation since I have ONE category per product (or is this reasoning backward?) but it seems like there is no one-to-many mapping...
Thanks for any help!
Addition:
I tried to add the many-to-one relation in the Person mapping, but I keep getting an exception saying "Creating proxy failed", and in the inner exception "Ambiguous match found".
I should maybe mention I am using an old version of NHibernate (1.2 I think) because that is the only one I got running with MS Access due to it not finding the JetDriver in newer versions.
I've put the mapping files, classes, and code where the error occurs in screenshots because I can't figure out how to post XML code here... It keeps reading it as html tags and skipping half of it. Anyway.
The mappings:
http://www.nickthissen.nl/Images/tmp7B5A.png
The classes:
http://www.nickthissen.nl/Images/tmpF809.png
The loading code where the error occurs:
http://www.nickthissen.nl/Images/tmp46B6.png
(As I said, the inner exception says "Ambiguous match found".
(Product in my example has been replaced by Person)
The Person and Category classes inherit Entity which is an abstract base class and defines the Id, Deleted, CreatedTime and UpdatedTime properties.
The code where the error occurs is in a generic 'manager' class (type parameter TEntity which must inherit Entity). It is simply supposed to load all entities with the Deleted attribute false. In this case, TEntity is 'Person'.
It works fine if I leave out the many-to-one Category mapping in the Person mapping, but then obviously the Category property is always null.
Oh yeah, sorry about the mix between C# and VB, the C# code is in a generic framework I use for multiple projects while the VB part is the actual implementation of that framework on my website and I just happened to use VB for that.
Help? Thanks!
In your Product class only needs to contain a Category object, you don't need a CategoryId property. Then in your Product mapping you need to have this entry
<many-to-one name="Category" column="CategoryId" />
UPDATE:
Your mappings appear to be missing the fully qualified name of the mapped class in the tag. See http://nhibernate.info/doc/nh/en/index.html#mapping-declaration-class
UPDATE 2:
See if this helps you NHibernate 1.2 in a .NET 4.0 solution
The 'Ambiguous match found' exception was caused by the project targeting .NET Framework 4, which does not seem to be compatible with NHibernate 1.2.1. I switched to 3.5 and that seems to solve that particular issue.
Now on to the next. As you can see, the Person class has a CategoryName property that should return the name of the current Category object, or an empty string if the category happens to be null. This is so I can databind a collection of Person objects to a grid, specifying 'CategoryName' as a property to bind a column to.
Apparently this does not work with NHibernate. Whenever I try to databind my collection of persons, I get this exception:
"Property accessor 'CategoryName' on object 'NHibernateWebTest.Database.Person' threw the following exception:'Could not initialize proxy - the owning Session was closed.'"
This occurs on the 'DataBind' method call in this code:
public virtual void LoadGrid()
{
if (this.Grid == null) return;
this.Grid.DataSource = this.Manager.Load();
this.Grid.DataBind();
}
(This is an ASP.NET project and 'Grid' is a GridView)
'this.Manager' returns an existing instance of NHibernateEntityManager, and I've already shown its Load method before, it contains this:
public virtual EntityCollection Load()
{
using (ISession session = this.GetSession())
{
var entities = session
.CreateCriteria(typeof (TEntity))
.Add(Expression.Eq("Deleted", false))
.List();
return new EntityCollection(entities);
}
}
(THere's some generic type parameters in there but this website seems to hide them (due to the html like tags I guess)... Sorry about that).
This may have something to do with NHibernate itself, as I said I'm completely new to this. When I call my Load method I would expect it to return an EntityCollection(Of Person) with all its properties already set. It seems I have to keep the ISession open while I am databinding for some reason..? That seems a little strange...
Can I get around this? Can I make my Load method simply return a collection of persons already fully loaded, so that I can access CategoryName whenever I want?
Wait... Is this lazy loading perhaps?
Does anybody know how I would map an entity with two many-to-many collections of the same child type.
My database structure is this....
The "normal" relationship will be....
tbl_Parent
col_Parent_ID
tbl_Parent_Child_Xref
col_Parent_ID
col_Child_ID
tbl_Child
col_Child_ID
The alternative relationship is...
tbl_Parent
col_Parent_ID
tbl_Include_ParentChild_Xref
col_Parent_ID
col_Child_ID
tbl_Child
col_Child_ID
The entity and mapping look like this...
public partial class ParentEntity : AuditableDataEntity<ParentEntity>
{
public virtual IList<ChildEntity> Children { get; set; }
public virtual IList<ChildEntity> IncludedChildren { get; set; }
}
public partial class ParentMap : IAutoMappingOverride<ParentEntity>
{
public void Override(AutoMapping<ParentEntity> mapping)
{
mapping.Table("tbl_Parent");
mapping.HasManyToMany(x => x.Children)
.Table("tbl_Parent_Child_Xref")
.ParentKeyColumn("col_Parent_ID")
.ChildKeyColumn("col_Child_ID")
.Inverse()
.Cascade.All();
mapping.HasManyToMany(x => x.IncludedChildren)
.Table("tbl_Include_ParentChild_Xref")
.ParentKeyColumn("col_Parent_ID")
.ChildKeyColumn("col_Child_ID")
.Inverse()
.Cascade.All();
}
}
The error that I'm getting is
"System.NotSupportedException: Can't figure out what the other side of the many-to-many property 'Children' should be."
I'm using NHibernate 2.1.2, FluentNhibernate 1.0.
It seems FNH is confused because you seem to map the same object (ChildEntity) to two different tables, if I'm not mistaken.
If you don't really need the two lists to get separated, perhaps using a discriminating value for each of your lists would solve the problem. Your first ChildEntity list would bind to the discriminationg value A, and you sesond to the discriminating value B, for instance.
Otherwise, I would perhaps opt for a derived class of your ChildEntity, just not to have the same name of ChildEntity.
IList<ChildEntity> ChildEntities
IList<IncludedChildEntity> IncludedChildEntities
And both your objects classes would be identitical.
If you say it works with NH, then it might be a bug as already stated. However, you may mix both XML mappings and AutoMapping with FNH. So, if it does work in NH, this would perhaps be my preference. But think this workaround should do it.
You know I'm just shooting in the dark here, but it almost sounds like your ChildEntity class isn't known by Hibernate .. that's typically where I've seen that sort of message. Hibernate inspects your class and sees this referenced class (ChildEntity in this case) that id doesn't know about.
Maybe you've moved on and found the issue at this point, but thought I'd see anyway.
Fluent is confused because you are referencing the same parent column twice. That is a no-no. And as far as I can tell from the activity i have seen, a fix is not coming any time soon.
You would have to write some custom extensions to get that working, if it is possible.
To my great pity, NHibernate cannot do that. Consider using another ORM.