NHibernate : Root collection with an root object - nhibernate

I want to track a list of root objects which are not contained by any element. I want the following pseudo code to work:
using (session1 = [...]) {
IList<FavoriteItem>list = session1.Linq<FavoriteItem>().ToList();
}
list.Add(item1);
list.Add(item2);
list.Remove(item3);
list.Remove(item4);
var item5 = list.First(i => i.Name = "Foo");
item5.Name = "Bar";
using (session2 = [...]) {
session2.Save(list);
}
This should automatically insert item1 and item2, delete item3 and item3 and update item5 (i.e. I don't want to call sesssion.SaveOrUpdate() for all items separately.
Is it possible to define a pseudo entity that is not associated with a table? For example I want to define the class Favorites and map 2 collection properties of it and than I want to write code like this:
using (session1 = [...]) {
var favs = session1.Linq<Favorites>();
}
favs.FavoriteColors.Add(new FavoriteColor(...));
favs.FavoriteMovies.Add(new FavoriteMovie(...));
using (session2 = [...]) {
session.SaveOrUpdate(favs);
}
FavoriteColors and FavoriteMovies are the only properties of the Favorites class and are of type IList and IList. I do only want to persist the these two collection properties but not the Favorites class.
Actually I want a IPersistentCollection object that tracks adds and removes that belongs to no parent entity and stands for itself (the same stuff that happens to collection properties of entities, only in my case I have no parent entity). This works perfectly well if the collections belong to an entity in which case I can add and remove items between two sessions.
Any help is much appreciated.

A simpler solution than a pseudo entity would be to wrap the list in an object that manages the things you want.
public class FavoriteList : IEnumerable
{
private List<FavoriteItem> list;
private ISession session;
public FavoriteList(ISession session)
{
list = session.Linq<FavoriteItem>().ToList();
this.session = session;
}
public void Add(FavoriteItem item)
{
session.SaveOrUpdate(item);
list.Add(item);
}
public void Remove(FavoriteItem item)
{
session.Delete(item); //or something like that
list.Remove(item);
}
public IEnumerator GetEnumerator()
{
return (list as IEnumerable).GetEnumerator();
}
}

I still have not found a real solution to this problem. My work around so far is that I have added the collection as a child collection property to another entity from which only one instance exists so far. But this solution breaks if there will be more instances of this entity and it has the disadvantage that the version of it is incremented every time a item is added or removed.
The other work around would have been to create a pseudo entity with no properties/columns (except an ID).
The third alternative I could think of is recreating the whole collection every time which is quite slow and does not work if other entities are referencing one of the items.
The last alternative would be to reimplement the dirty checking functionality myself but this would add some complexity and code duplication.
If somebody knows better alternatives I would be glad for any comments.

Related

How to load different children classes to parent collection in Entity Framework Core?

Given the following:
public class Parent
{
public ChildType childType;
}
public class ChildA : Parent { ... }
public class ChildB : Parent { ... }
public enum ChildType {
childA,
childB
}
public class Content {
public long contentId;
public string? name;
public ICollection<Parent>? contentCollection; <--
...
}
I would like to use the Content class as part of an API. Is it possible to load both children into the collection just using the enum as a discriminator to determine which to cast to?
My understanding is the child objects would need to be loaded from EF as their child class first, then cast to the parent class before being added to the collection as they would be missing properties upon casting back to the child class otherwise. Is this correct? And how can the dbContext be configured to handle this when accessing through the Content class?
Apologies for all the questions, I have not done this before and cannot find an example online. I would like to know any thoughts, pointers or general info before proceeding. Please say if anything is unclear or more info is required.
Edit:
I was trying to map the child objects as their types from the DB, upcast to the parent type to be able to add multiple types to the one collection and then downcast when required for use. As far as I was aware, EF did not have the functionality to do this.
For anyone else who comes across this which needs assistance, I solved my issue by just using ADO.NET which is what entity framework is built around. I was getting stuck by trying to get this working using EF but my belief is it is not able to be done with EF.
Formatting is off a little, and I have renamed everything to suit my original question but here is the solution involved:
Writing an SP to retrieve the data similar to if the objects were stored in a TPH pattern.
Calling that SP using SQLConnection/SQLCommand. (I added this into my context class to keep DAL together but unsure if this is best practice)
public async Task<Collection<Parent>> GetModelMapCollectionAsync(long id) {
Collection<Parent> parentCollection;
using (SqlConnection connection = new SqlConnection(this.Database.GetConnectionString()))
{
using (SqlCommand sqlCommand = new SqlCommand("GetModelMapCollectionAsync", connection))
{
sqlCommand.CommandType = System.Data.CommandType.StoredProcedure;
sqlCommand.Parameters.Add(new SqlParameter("#id", id));
await connection.OpenAsync();
await sqlCommand.ExecuteNonQueryAsync();
using (SqlDataReader sqlDataReader = await sqlCommand.ExecuteReaderAsync())
{
MapCollectionResult(sqlDataReader, out parentCollection);
}
}
}
return parentCollection; }
Using a nuget package called Dapper, create row parsers for each type (easiest solution for readability/simplicity IMO)
Use the discriminator column to determine which parser to use on each row returned from the SP. This creates the child object from the row which allows it to be downcast back later.
Add that parsed object to the collection.
private void MapCollectionResult(SqlDataReader sqlDataReader, out Collection parentCollection)
{
parentCollection= new Collection();
var parentParser = sqlDataReader.GetRowParser<Parent>(typeof(Parent));
var paramClassParser = sqlDataReader.GetRowParser<ParamClass>(typeof(ParamClass));
var childAParser = sqlDataReader.GetRowParser<ChildA>(typeof(ChildA));
var childBParser = sqlDataReader.GetRowParser<ChildB>(typeof(ChildB));
ChildType type = ChildType.None;
Parent parent;
while (sqlDataReader.Read())
{
type = (ChildType)sqlDataReader["ChildTypeId"];
switch(type)
{
case ChildType.ChildA:
parent = childAParser(sqlDataReader);
break;
case ChildType.ChildB:
parent = childBParser(sqlDataReader);
break;
default:
parent = parentParser(sqlDataReader);
break;
}
parent.paramClass = paramClassParser(sqlDataReader);
parentCollection.Add(parent);
}}

Deserializing IEnumerable with private backing field in RavenDb

I've been modeling a domain for a couple of days now and not been thinking at all at persistance but instead focusing on domain logic. Now I'm ready to persist my domain objects, some of which contains IEnumerable of child entities. Using RavenDb, the persistance is 'easy', but when loading my objects back again, all of the IEnumerables are empty.
I've realized this is because they don't have any property setters at all, but instead uses a list as a backing field. The user of the domain aggregate root can add child entities through a public method and not directly on the collection.
private readonly List<VeryImportantPart> _veryImportantParts;
public IEnumerable<VeryImportantPart> VeryImportantParts { get { return _veryImportantParts; } }
And the method for adding, nothing fancy...
public void AddVeryImportantPart(VeryImportantPart part)
{
// some logic...
_veryImportantParts.Add(part);
}
I can fix this by adding a private/protected setter on all my IEnumerables with backing fields but it looks... well... not super sexy.
private List<VeryImportantPart> _veryImportantParts;
public IEnumerable<VeryImportantPart> VeryImportantParts
{
get { return _veryImportantParts; }
protected set { _veryImportantParts = value.ToList(); }
}
Now the RavenDb json serializer will populate my objects on load again, but I'm curious if there isn't a cleaner way of doing this?
I've been fiddeling with the JsonContractResolver but haven't found a solution yet...
I think I've found the root cause of this issue and it's probably due to the fact that many of my entities were created using:
protected MyClass(Guid id, string name, string description) : this()
{ .... }
public static MyClass Create(string name, string description)
{
return new MyClass(Guid.NewGuid(), name, description);
}
When deserializing, RavenDb/Json.net couldn't rebuild my entities in a proper way...
Changing to using a public constructor made all the difference.
Do you need to keep a private backing field? Often an automatic property will do.
public IList<VeryImportantPart> VeryImportantParts { get; protected set; }
When doing so, you may want to initialize your list in the constructor:
VeryImportantParts = new List<VeryImportantPart>();
This is optional, of course, but it allows you to create a new class and start adding to the list right away, before it is persisted. When Raven deserializes a class, it will use the setter to overwrite the default blank list, so this just helps with the first store.
You certainly won't be able to use a readonly field, as it couldn't be replaced during deserialization. It might be possible to write a contract resolver or converter that fills an existing list rather than creating a new one, but that seems like a rather complex solution.
Using an automatic property can add clarity to your code anyway - as it is less confusing whether to use the field or the property.

Can NHibernate query for specific children without lazy loading the entire collection?

When I have an entity object with a one-to-many child collection, and I need to query for a specific child object, is there a feature or some clever pattern I haven't come up with yet to avoid that NHibernate fetches the entire child collection?
Example:
class Parent
{
public virtual int Id { get; proteced set; } // generated PK
public virtual IEnumerable<Child> Children { get; proteced set; }
}
class Child
{
public virtual int Id { get; protected set; } // generated PK
public virtual string Name { get; protected set; }
public virtual Parent Parent { get; protected set; }
}
// mapped with Fluent
class Service
{
private readonly ISessionFactory sessionFactory;
public Service(ISessionFactory sessionFactory)
{
this.sessionFactory = sessionFactory;
}
void DoSomethingWithChildrenNamedBob(int parentId)
{
using(var session = sessionFactory.OpenSession())
{
var parent = session.Get<Parent>(parentId);
// Will cause lazy fetch of all children!
var childrenNamedBob = parent.Children.Where(c => c.Name == "Bob");
// do something with the children
}
}
}
I know it's not the best example because in this case one would probably just query the Child entities directly, but I have encountered situations where I already had a Parent object and needed to traverse specific sub-trees through it.
Short answer: no. Longer answer: you can make it do this, with some sleight of hand.
Rippo's answer above shows how you would do it the 'proper' NHibernate way (whether it's with Linq or QueryOver or HQL doesn't really matter - the point is you have to step outside the parent -> child relationship to do a query). You can take this a step further and disguise this behind a façade. But to do so, you have to remove the mapped relationship entirely and replace it with a query at all times. You'd take out the Parent -> Children mapping, but leave the Child -> Parent mapping intact; then re-write the property on Parent to look like this:
public virtual IQueryable<Child> Children
{
get
{
// somehow get a reference to the ISession (I use ambient context), then
return session.Query<Child>().Where(c => c.Parent == this);
}
}
Now, when you use Parent.Children you get back a queryable collection, so you could then write
IEnumerable<Child> childrenNamedBob = parent.Children.Where(c => c.Name == "Bob");
The only way you could do this and preserve the mapping is to amend NHibernate's collection objects (or inject your own). Diego Mijelshon (who is around these parts) wrote a spike of exactly that, adding IQueryable support to NHibernate collections so you could do
IEnumerable<Child> childrenNamedBob = parent.Children.AsQueryable().Where(c => c.Name == "Bob");
But from what I can see, this never went any further and there's no apparent plan to add this capability to NH. I have run Diego's code and it does work, but obviously it's not production quality and hasn't been tested, and I don't think it's ever been officially 'released' even as a private patch.
Here's the link to the discussion on the NH issue tracker: https://nhibernate.jira.com/browse/NH-2319
I believe NH should support this out of the box, as it's a natural way for most .NET devs to want to interact with pretty much anything enumerable, now that we have Linq, and not being able to do it without the side-effect of loading an unbounded collection into RAM sucks. But the traditional NH model is session -> query and that's what 99% of people use.
I asked the same question on NHusers a few weeks ago and didn't get an answer so I suspect the answer is you will always get all the parents children and then perform a in-memory filter. In many cases this might be the correct way in seeing it.
In your case I would rewrite the query to be:-
var childrenNamedBob = session.Query<Children>()
.Where(w => w.Parent.Id == parentId && w.Name == "Bob");
Then simply to get parent (if childrenNamedBob has results) you could call:-
var parent = childrenNamedBob.First().Parent;
or as you rightly pointed out:-
var parent = session.Get<Parent>(parentId);
You can now do that with NHibernate 5 directly without specific code !
See https://github.com/nhibernate/nhibernate-core/blob/master/releasenotes.txt
Build 5.0.0
=============================
** Highlights
...
* Entities collections can be queried with .AsQueryable() Linq extension without being fully loaded.
...

NHibernate ExcludeProperty: Why is there no IncludeProperty

The Example class is great if you are specifying which properties you want to exclude from the example. But what if you want to specify which properties to include?
Take this example: looking for people in the database that have the same name.
A Person object has many properties. So to use the NHibernate.Criterion.Example object I would have to specify every field to exclude - which could be many.
Why is there no IncludeProperty method?
I have a Person object and I want to see if it is a duplicte based on pre-set business rules (FirstName, LastName, DateOfBirth). These rules could be changed to include a postcode or something else - and I'd like to make that configurable.
Is there an easy way around this?
I have a solution to the IncludeProperty issue:
private Type persitentType = typeof(T);
public IList<T> GetByExample(T exampleInstance, params string[] propertiesToInclude)
{
// get the properties that will be excluded
List<string> propertiesToExclude =
persitentType.GetProperties().Where(p => propertiesToInclude.Contains(p.Name) == false).Select(p => p.Name).ToList();
// create the criteria based on the example and excluding the given properties
ICriteria criteria = NHibernateSession.CreateCriteria(persitentType);
Example example = Example.Create(exampleInstance);
foreach (string propertyToExclude in propertiesToExclude)
{
example.ExcludeProperty(propertyToExclude);
}
criteria.Add(example);
// return the result
return criteria.List<T>();
}
Add this method to your repository class. It uses reflection to determine what properties the specified object has, and then finds the properties to exclude based on those that have been specified as includes.

What is a good way to do multi-row updates in struts (with struts live)?

Without using DynaForm and it's kin.
I would like to use a POJO data transfer object, e.g., Person:
public class Person {
private Long id;
private String firstName;
private String lastName;
// ... getters / setters for the fields
}
In the struts live action form we would have:
public class PersonUpdateForm extends SLActionForm {
String organization;
Person[] persons; // all the people will be changed to this organization; they're names and so forth can be updated at the same time (stupid, but a client might desire this)
// getters / setters + index setters / getters for persons
}
What would the corresponding html:text tags look like in the JSP to allow this? If I switch to a List persons field and use a lazy-loading list (in commons-collections) how would that change thinsg?
There seems to be no good way to do this in struts-1.2(.9?)
All help is greatly appreciated!!! If you need more context let me know and I can provide some.
Okay, I believe I've figured it out! The trick is to have your indexed getter create an element each time the getPersons() method is called by the populate method of BeanUtils. The code is completed yet, but I got a positive looking result. It's 3:30 and I've been stuck on this a while. Nobody seemded to know the answer, which makes me want to smack them in the head with a trout. As for my own ignorance ... I only have them to blame!
public List<Person> getPersons() {
persons.add(new Person()); // BeanUtils needs to know the list is large enough
return persons;
}
Add your indexed getters and setters too, of course.
I remember how I actually did this. You must pre-initialize the persons List above to the maximum size you expect to transfer. This is because the List is first converted to an array, the properties then set on each element of the array, and finally the List set back using setPersons(...). Therefore, using a lazy-loading List implementation or similar approach (such as that show above) will NOT work with struts live. Here's what you need to do in more detail:
private List<Person> persons = new ArrayList<Person>(MAX_PEOPLE);
public MyConstructor() { for(int i = 0; i < MAX_PEOPLE; i++) persons.add(new Person()); }
public List<Person> getPeopleSubmitted() {
List<Person> copy = new ArrayList<Person>();
for(Person p : persons) {
if(p.getId() != null) copy.add(p);
// id will be set for the submitted elements;
// the others will have a null id
}
return copy; // only the submitted persons returned - not the blank templates
}
That's basically what you have to do! But the real question is - who's using struts live anymore?!