Changing sub-types in NHibernate - nhibernate

I've already read NHibernate - Changing sub-types and I don't find that satisfactory to my situation.
My system allows users to schedule jobs. Schedules can be set up with different types of schedule criteria (Once only, Daily, Weekly, Monthly by day of month, and Monthly by week of month). Each of these have very different data and behavior. It is perfectly valid for a user to change a schedule from one criteria type to another.
I attempted to make this work by grabbing the schedule id that was saved previously, creating a new instance of the schedule with the new type, setting the id, and saving. All of the data was updated as expected, except, of course, the discriminator.
Changing my model would be an absolute last resort.
At this point, I am looking at saving the new criteria (with a new id) and updating the references to it, then deleting the old criteria.
Does someone have a better idea?

Have you tried modifing your disciminator mapping to add force=true like the following hbm.xml element
<discriminator column="DiscriminatorColumnName" force="true" />

Since you're already bending the NHibernate view of object identity, why don't you just update it outside of NHib using some custom SQL?
My preferred solution would be to update my model, but you've said that that's a last resort for you.

If you want to use NHibernate, then the concession you must make is:
Write object-oriented code.
If your particular case is arduous to express in an object-oriented manner, then you should not be using NHibernate for that case.
For your case, you should:
create a new instance of a class deriving Schedule, and permit it to have a new ID
copy the relevant properties from the old Schedule instance
delete the old Schedule instance from the Session and ensure that the Job instance in question does not reference it
add the new Schedule instance to the Session and ensure that the Job instance in question references it
This will end up, at the database level, as a delete and insert, rather than an update.
This is not a last resort. This should have been your first resort. This is the right way to do it from an object-oriented perspective.

Related

Required an expert suggestion in TSQL

I have a scenarios where Table A has reference to Table B , Table B has a reference on Table C column ...etc.
To implement an update task in my project I ought to implement it in two phase logic
i.e. delete the row first and add the latest again.
But unfortunately , when I try to delete a row in table A it has reference which in turn has reference to other table and so on. Hence my logic of delete and add does not work in a proper way all the time. Even if it is deleted and added again , the sequence at which it is being added is last i.e. as a new record. Hence I am losing all the earlier references track in the same order as old one.
Hence I would like to delete a row from a table without effecting the references i.e. for time being it should allow to ignore reference , once i added it again i.e update record then i need to re-enforce/enable back the reference.
Is it possible to do in such a way ? or there any other logic works in similar fashion or replace the original intention ? could anyone please provide your expertise advice on this ?
How general logic of windows service pack works ? can any one elaborate on that? or share some info or doc or blog regarding the same?
Thank you so much.
Regards,
Shyam
What you want to do is a bad practice, I would rethink your design. It doesn't let you delete the parent record because there are child records. That is what the database ii supposed to and to try to circumvent it is a 100% guarantee of bad data.
If what you are trying to accomplish is to move the child records to a new parent, that can be done but you add the new record first and then make updates. It is best if you have some field to be able to define what old record it used to be associated with or a mapping table to use to make many changes. Then you would need to run updates for every child table. This kind of thing shoudl be a one time change, not a regular practice. It certainly shoudl virtually never happen from the application and shoudl only be done by a qualified databse developer.
If what you are trying to accomplish is to inactivate the parent so it can no longer be used for some purposes(such as creating new orders) and leave the details for reporting (wouldn't want to lose the finacials for old orders), then you should put an active flag on the table and use that to filter records instead. Often this means creating a view of only active records and pointing the code to the view insted of directly to the table.

What is the best method of logging data changes and user activity in an SQL database?

I'm starting a new application and was wondering what the best method of logging is. Some tables in the database will need to have every change recorded, and the user that made the change. Other tables may just need to have the last modified time recorded.
In previous applications I've used different methods to do this but want to hear what others have done.
I've tried the following:
Add a "modified" date-time field to the table to record the last time it was edited.
Add a secondary table just for recording changes in a primary table. Each row in the secondary table represents a changed field in the primary table. So one record update in the primary could create several records in the secondary table.
Add a table similar to no.2 but it records edits across three or fours tables, reference the table it relates to in an additional field.
what methods do you use and would recommend?
Also what is the best way to record deleted data? I never like the idea that a user can permanently delete a record from the DB, so usually I have a boolean field 'deleted' which is changed to true when its deleted, and then it'll be filtered out of all queries at model level. Any other suggestions on this?
Last one.. What is the best method for recording user activity? At the moment I have a table which records logins/logouts/password changes etc, and depending what the action is, gives it a code either 1,2, 3 etc.
Hope I haven't crammed too much into this question. thanks.
I know it's a very old question, but I'd wanted to add more detailed answer as this is the first link I got googling about db logging.
There are basically two ways to log data changes:
on application server layer
on database layer.
If you can, just use logging on server side. It is much more clear and flexible.
If you need to log on database layer you can use triggers, as #StanislavL said. But triggers can slow down your database performance and limit you to store change log in the same database.
Also, you can look at the transaction log monitoring.
For example, in PostgreSQL you can use mechanism of logical replication to stream changes in json format from your database to anywhere.
In the separate service you can receive, handle and log changes in any form and in any database (for example just put json you got to Mongo)
You can add triggers to any tracked table to olisten insert/update/delete. In the triggers just check NEW and OLD values and write them in a special table with columns
table_name
entity_id
modification_time
previous_value
new_value
user
It's hard to figure out user who makes changes but possible if you add changed_by column in the table you listen.

Having two tables for capturing data at a specific moment

I'm creating an application which will hold curriculum vitaes
the user should be able to:
create different work information for using with different CV's
Name of work, Start date, End Date, ...
CV will have many WorkInformations
Workinformation belongs to many CV's
though when a user changes workinformation outside the scope of the CV I don't want it to change within the current CV's.
Is it correct to have an extra table with the same information?
Its supposed to create a new "workinformation" from a copy of a "workinformation_that_shouldent.."
or any other approach I should look into, open for all suggestions, new to designing relational databases.
No, I don't think you should have a different workinformation table.
Instead, you should have the CV point to a work information record. When the work information record changes outside the CV world, then create a new version of the record. That way, all work information records are in the same table. The ones that CVs refer to remain the same.
You can keep track of different versions of the same record in more than one way. A simple way is to have versions refer back to the base work information record, with another field having the version number.
By the way, I find it unusual that a work information record would be referred to by multiple CVs.

How to effectively refresh many to many relationship

Lets say I have entity A, which have many to many relationship with another entities of type A. So on entity A, I have collection of A. And lets say I have to "update" this relationships according to some external service - from time to time I receive notification that relations for certain entity has changed, and array of IDs of current related entities - some relations can be new, some existing, some of existing no longer there... How can I effectively update my database with EF ?
Some ideas:
eager load entity with its related entities, do foreach on collection of IDs from external service, and remove/add as needed. But this is not very effective - need to load possibly hundreds of related entities
clear current relations and insert new. But how ? Maybe perform delete by stored procedure, and then insert by "fake" objects
a.Related.Add(new A { Id = idFromArray })
but can this be done in transaction ? (call to stored procedure and then inserts done by SaveChanges)
or is there any 3rd way ?
Thanx.
Well, "from time to time" does not sound like a situation to think much about performance improvement (unless you mean "from millisecond to millisecond") :)
Anyway, the first approach is the correct idea to do this update without a stored procedure. And yes, you must load all old related entities because updating a many-to-many relationship goes only though EFs change detection. There is no exposed foreign key you could leverage to update the relations without having loaded the navigation properties.
An example how this might look in detail is here (fresh question from yesterday):
Selecting & Updating Many-To-Many in Entity Framework 4
(Only the last code snippet before the "Edit" section is relevant to your question and the Edit section itself.)
For your second solution you can wrap the whole operation into a manually created transaction:
using (var scope = new TransactionScope())
{
using (var context = new MyContext())
{
// ... Call Stored Procedure to delete relationships in link table
// ... Insert fake objects for new relationships
context.SaveChanges();
}
scope.Complete();
}
Ok, solution found. Of course, pure EF solution is the first one proposed in original question.
But, if performance matters, there IS a third way, the best one, although it is SQL server specific (afaik) - one procedure with table-valued parameter. All new related IDs goes in, and the stored procedure performs delete and inserts in transaction.
Look for the examples and performance comparison here (great article, i based my solution on it):
http://www.sommarskog.se/arrays-in-sql-2008.html

NHibernate: Dynamic Table Mapping

I have a scenario where I want to persist document info record to a table specific to the typo of document, rather than a generic table for all records.
For example, records for Invoices will be stored in dbo.Doc_1000 and records for Receipts will be stored in dbo.Doc_2000 where 1000 and 2000 are id autogenerate and store in well-known table (dbo.TypeOfDoc.
Furthermore each dbo.Doc.xxx table have a group of system column (always the same) and could have a group of dynamic column (metadata).
Tables dbo.Doc.xxx and eventually dynamic column are clearly created at runtime.
If this is possible with NHibernate???
Thanks.
hope that I got your point. I am currently looking for a solution for a problem that looks similar. I want to integrate a feature in my application where the admin user can design an entity at runtime.
As far as I know, once the SessionFactory is configured and ready to use, there is no way to modify the mapping used by nhibernate. If you want to use a customized table structure that is configured, created and modified at runtime, you should have a place where a corresponding mapping lives, e.g. as a nhibernate mapping xml file and you have to set up a new SessionFactory each time you change the database model to reflect these changes.