Yet another question.

I'm building a test app based on the Northwind DB. The employee table has a column, ReportsTo, which is the ID for another row in the same table. I have translated this into a <many-to-one> relationship in my mapping file.

All the rows in the Employees table has an id in the ReportsTo DB. Therefore, each mapped entity created by NHibernate could potentially point to another employee, one level deeper in the hierarchy.

One other potential situation is the case where two employees report to each other, creating a circular reference.

My question is this: now deep does NHibernate parse the nested references? How does NHibernate deal with circular references of this type?

If Employee is lazy, then ReportTo will be load at its first access.
Else, all ReportTo will be loaded (each with its query) until they are all in memory.

AFAIK, in both case, it should work recursivily with no problem; note that the session will not load an instance that is already in its cache, so there is no problem with the circular reference.