Loquacious Configuration in NHibernate 3

One of the new features in NHibernate 3 is the addition of a fluent API for configuring NHibernate through code. Fluent NHibernate has provided a fluent configuration API for awhile, but now we have an option built into NHibernate itself. (Personally I prefer the new Loquacious API to Fluent NHibernate’s configuration API as I find Loquacious more discoverable. Given that Fluent NHibernate is built on top of NHibernate, you can always use Loquacious with Fluent NHibernate too. N.B. I still really like Fluent NHibernate’s ClassMap<T>, automapping capabilities, and PersistenceSpecification<T>. So don’t take my preference regarding fluent configuration as a denouncement of Fluent NHibernate.)

The fluent configuration API built into NHibernate is called Loquacious configuration and exists as a set of extensions methods on NHibernate.Cfg.Configuration. You can access these extension methods by importing in the NHibernate.Cfg.Loquacious namespace.

var cfg = new Configuration();
cfg.Proxy(p => p.ProxyFactoryFactory<ProxyFactoryFactory>())
  .DataBaseIntegration(db => {
                           db.ConnectionStringName = "scratch";
                           db.Dialect<MsSql2008Dialect>();
                           db.BatchSize = 500;
                       })
  .AddAssembly(typeof(Blog).Assembly)
  .SessionFactory().GenerateStatistics();

On the second line, we configure the ProxyFactoryFactory, which is responsible for generating the proxies needed for lazy loading. The ProxyFactoryFactory type parameter (stuff between the <>) is in the NHibernate.ByteCode.Castle namespace. (I have a reference to the NHibernate.ByteCode.Castle assembly too.) So we’re using Castle to generate our proxies. We could also use LinFu or Spring.

Setting db.ConnectionStringName causes NHibernate to read the connection string from the <connectionStrings/> config section of the [App|Web].config. This keeps your connection strings in an easily managed location without being baked into your code. You can perform the same trick in XML-based configuration by using the connection.connection_string_name property instead of the more commonly used connection.connection_string.

Configuring BatchSize turns on update batching in databases, which support it. (Support is limited to SqlClient and OracleDataClient currently and relies on features of these drivers.) Updating batching allows NHibernate to group together multiple, related INSERT, UPDATE, or DELETE statements in a single round-trip to the database. This setting isn’t strictly necessary, but can give you a nice performance boost with DML statements. The value of 500 represents the maximum number of DML statements in one batch. The choice of 500 is arbitrary and should be tuned for your application.

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