Bundling a list of entities into a component - nhibernate

Question

With FluentNHibernate I have mapped a UserPreference entity which references the GeneralPreference, GeneralPreferenceOption, and Profile entities:
public class UserPreference
{
public virtual long Id { get; set; }
public virtual Profile Profile { get; set; }
public virtual GeneralPreference Preference { get; set; }
public virtual GeneralPreferenceOption Value { get; set; }
}
It's easy enough to map a list of UserPreference on my Profile entity, but what I actually would like to do is wrap this list inside another class so that I can simplify operations concerning a user's given preferences:
public class Preferences
{
public IList<UserPreferences> UserPreferences{get;set;}
public Language Language {
{
//look up the language preference here
}
}
This kind of feels like a Component, but Components were not created for this type of scenario. Does anyone have any pointers on how I might map this?

Answer 1

I figured out a way to do this by mapping a private property on my Profile Entity. Using the techniques from the Fluent NHibernate wiki on mapping private properties (http://wiki.fluentnhibernate.org/Fluent_mapping_private_properties) I map a collection of UserPreference on my Profile Entity. Then I create another class PropertyHandler which takes an IEnumerable as a constructor parameter and make an instance of this a public property on Profile as well:
public class Profile
{
private PreferenceHandler _preferenceHandler;
get { return _preferenceHandler ?? (_preferenceHandler = new PreferenceHandler(UserPreferences)); }
private IEnumerable<UserPreference> UserPreferences { get; set; }
public static class Expressions
{
public static readonly Expression<Func<Profile, IEnumerable<UserPreference>>> UserPreferences = x => x.UserPreferences;
}
}
Notice the nested static class. It's used to enable mapping of a private property with FluentNHibernate.
The mapping class looks something like this:
public class ProfileMappings : ClassMap<Profile>
{
public ProfileMappings()
{
//... other mappings
HasMany(Profile.Expressions.UserPreferences);
}
}
I can now use the PreferenceHandler class to create helper methods over my collection of UserPreference.
An alternative is to build extension methods for IEnumberable. This works, but I decided not to do this because
1) I'm not really extending the IEnumerable functionality and
2) my helper methods disappear inamongst all the other IEnumerable extension methods making the whole thing a bit cluttered.