Hello All,
I'm a developer just landed to the world of NHibernate and I'm trying to understand it better...

At the moment I'm building my first real application using it and I just came into 2 problems: how can I use my usual standard business object architectur in NH?
I usually use strongly-typed collection and the special-case pattern, but can't understand how to convert these 2 practices for use with NH.

I made a search on this forum or over the internet but just found questions without an answer...
seems strange that nobody is using this kind of "standard" approach in developing NH domain model library.

Thank you
Simone

There's no support for strongly-typed collections currently. Ayende Rahien recently created a library to support generic collections with NHibernate. As for the special-case pattern, this could probably be implemented using a custom persister... (overriding Instantiate method).

You may wrap collections in a set of methods (like "Add(XXX)", "XXXCount", "RemoveXXXAt()", etc.)
Here is an example: Factory and collection design

Thank you
I found out a possibile solution...
basically I make 2 properties
one is accessed by NH and the other is accessed by the domain model
and both refers to the same IList as storage.

Simo

I follow alot of the patterns mentioned in Domain Driven Design by Eric Evans. One thing I have being doing lately is implementing an interface which I call a smart collection. I then basically have an Adapter for the Smart collection interface to wrap the actual collection, IList or ISet.

The smart collection contains all of the add, remove, insert operations, and also a FindById operation. Smart Collection can check business logic before access to the real collection is allowed. Having and Adapter around the real collection also gives me the ability to use some of NHibernates more advanced features such as collection filters.