NHibernate 4.x Cookbook

Book excerpt: Over 90 incredible and powerful recipes to help you efficiently use NHibernate in your application About This Book Master the full range of NHibernate features through detailed example recipes that you can quickly apply to your own applications Reduce hours of application development time and get a better application architecture and improved performance Create, maintain, and update your database structure automatically with the help of NHibernate Who This Book Is For This book is written for .NET developers who want to use NHibernate and those who want to deepen their knowledge of the platform. Examples are written in C# and XML. Some basic knowledge of SQL is assumed. If you build .NET applications that use relational databases, this book is for you. What You Will Learn Create a persistent object model to move data in and out of your database Build the database from your model automatically Configure NHibernate for use with WebForms, MVC, WPF, and WinForms applications Create database queries using a variety of methods Improve the performance of your applications using a variety of techniques Build an infrastructure for fast, easy, test-driven development of your data access layer Implement entity validation, auditing, full-text search, horizontal partitioning (sharding), and spatial queries using NHibernate Contrib projects In Detail NHibernate is a mature, flexible, scalable, and feature-complete open source project for data access. Although it sounds like an easy task to build and maintain database applications, it can be challenging to get beyond the basics and develop applications that meet your needs perfectly. NHibernate allows you to use plain SQL and stored procedures less and keep focus on your application logic instead. Learning the best practices for a NHibernate-based application will help you avoid problems and ensure that your project is a success. The book will take you from the absolute basics of NHibernate through to its most advanced features, showing you how to take full advantage of each concept to quickly create amazing database applications. You will learn several techniques for each of the four core NHibernate tasks—configuration, mapping, session and transaction management, and querying—and which techniques fit best with various types of applications. In short, you will be able to build an application using NHibernate by the end of the book. You will also learn how to best implement enterprise application architecture patterns using NHibernate, leading to clean, easy-to-understand code and increased productivity. In addition to new features, you will learn creative ways to extend the NHibernate core, as well as gaining techniques to work with the NHibernate search, shards, spatial, envers, and validation projects. Style and approach This book contains recipes with examples organized in functional areas, each containing step-by-step instructions on everything necessary to execute a particular task. The book is designed so you can read it from start to end or just open up any chapter and start following the recipes.