Could someone please shed some light on dynamic instantiation? I actually did manage to get it to work but it doesn't seem to me to be functioning as it should be. I've read a few posts found through a google search - the most interesting making mention of importing a class somewhere, apparently in the hbm.xml file, but I couldn't make that work - and the section in the book, "Hibernate In Action" which says that Hibernate doesn't even have to know about the transient class, but after some testing that hasn't been my experience and I actually needed to create a hbm.xml file for the transient class to get it to work. Has anyone made use of this feature? If so, please comment on it.

Thanks,
Scott

You can import the transient types you want to dynamically instatiate from NHibernate by importing them through the Mappings object (generated by the Configuration object):



Normally I loop through all the types I want to be able to dynamically instantiate and call the AddImport method for each one before I instantiate my SessionFactory.

NHibernate doesn't exactly know about the transient type in terms of it being mapped, but it does need to know about the type. I don't think you need to do the import if the type is in the same assembly...but I'm not sure.

Anyway, this works fine for me!

Symon.

The .CreateMappings.AddImport(...) was the piece of information I was missing. I have modified my code and things are working beautifully...and make sense! Thanks Symon.

CreateMappings is part of internal API actually (it's undocumented), so don't rely on it too much. It's better to import the class in a mapping file, as it was mentioned, for example like this:


The reason NHibernate requires classes to be imported while Hibernate doesn't is that the syntax of fully-qualified class names is different in .NET (the assembly part is present), and including an assembly-qualified class name directly in an HQL query would confuse the HQL parser.

Thanks for the further clarification, Sergey. I think I will adapt my code to make use of what you have said to ensure I don't have trouble in the future.

-Scott