I'm planning to implement a Custom Value Type for Chess Games in Algebraic Chess Notation (ACN)?

The ACN representation of a chess game would be stored in a VARCHAR column.

The object model of a Chess Game would be pretty fine grained - at least a List of Moves or possibly a Tree of Moves (taking variants into account).

The problem is that generating the Object Graph for a Chess Game from an ACN (and the other way round) can be a very expensive process - depending on the length of the game this can easily take 1/2 second or so...

Is a custom value type the right way to go?

Or should I continue to use a "string" type and use two methods for serializing and deserializing the game to/from ACN?

Can lazy loading be applied to just one property of a class?

Regards,

Andreas

There should be no advantage of using custom serialisation/deserialisation over using a UserType, you will have to face the time effort sometimes. There is no way to do lazy loading of single properties, you can however use the Leightweight Class Pattern