NHibernate version:
1.2

Has the NHibernateUtil.IsInitialized impl changed since prior versions? I might be wrong here, but as far as I remember the following worked ok in previous versions....

I have an User class with a simple collection, ApplicationRoleCollection, which is lazy loaded. Lazy loading works but NHibernateUtil.IsInitialized seems to always return true no matter if the proxy has been initialized or not.

The following little test will fail because IsInitialized returns true.
[pseudo]
User user = [sess].Load<User>(someId);
Assert.IsFalse(NHibernateUtil.IsInitialized(user.ApplicationRuleCollection));
[/pseudo]

I'm pretty sure lazy loading works because if the following snippet runs...
User user = Session.Load<User>(someId);
[sess].Close();
user.ApplicationRuleCollection[0].Something();
...NHibernate complains, "Could not initialize proxy - the owning Session was closed.", just as expected.

Has something changed regarding NHibernateUtil.IsInitialized() in nhib v 1.2?

Regards
Roger

This could very well be a bug. Please report it to JIRA. If you could also create a test case, that would be most helpful. Please see the following article for some information on how to do so. Thanks.
http://hibernate.org/428.html

I've reported it to JIRA with test included.

http://jira.nhibernate.org/browse/NH-1198

/R

I feel a bit ashamed of myself, turned out there was an obvious reason for this too happend. I exposed my collection in a wrapper (ReadonlyCollection<T>) which of course doesn't derive from IPersistentCollection which is looked for in nhib's IsInitialized method. In that case - IsInitialized always returns true.

However - I must say that to encapsulate collections is something "everybody" do? And when you have a complex graph and reading it all in the query would be a bad option - at least I heavily rely on IsInitalize and Initialize.

I cannot be the only one that run into this problem? Is the only option to implement something own that reads the "mapped collection field" through reflection directly and use this object to IsInitialize/Initialize?

For me it would be more obvious if Initialize and IsInitialzed would throw an exception if the object sent to them were unknown types instead of doing nothing/return true.

Regards
Roger

Can I close the JIRA issue then?

I really don't know if this is considered a bug or not. I totally understand why nhibernate behaves the way it does, and I find it hard to see any general solution to this problem myself. But - I cannot be the only one encapsulting my collections. At least I think the IsInitialize/Initialize would throw if the collection is of unknown type.

Do you yourself have any recommendations about this? I guess the only solution is to somehow get the "real" mapped data and pass this to the IsInitialize/Initialize.

Regards
Roger

You can either expose the real collection so you can call IsInitialized() on it, or you can add an IsApplicationRolesInitialized() method on your domain class. The first solution obviously breaks encapsulation, the second adds dependency of NHibernate to your domain class. A third option that prevents both is to use a delegate; but the syntax is kind of ugly:

and call it like this

There are many ways to skin a cat.

Ultimately, NHibernate only care that the collection is an IList or its generic variant. To throw an exception on an "unknown collection", it means going through the meta data and basically do a validation on every IsInitialized() call. Someone else is going to complain about performance problem then. Like everything, there is always a trade off. In this case, it has been chosen to leave that responsibility with the user/programmer. Hope this make sense.

Actually, NHibenrate can't even check the metadata as NHibernateUtil.IsInitialized() is only given a reference to an object. Without the class and property path, it wouldn't even know where to look.

Thanks.

FYI - I did my own way of skinning the cat, I wrapped the IsInitialized/Initialize in my own method where I first check if the "proxy" is of type ReadonlyCollection<T> (99% of my props are) and in that case get the real proxy using reflection before hitting nhib's methods.
Just another way of skinning the cat ;). Feels a bit awkard, but it doesn't feel good letting my entities knowing whether its collections has been initialized or not.

I do get your point about exceptions. However - It doesn't feel good that IsInitialized returns true when a proxy isn't used. Maybe an enum saying Yes, No or LazyLoadingIsNotUsed? Would at least have had helped me a lot.

Thanks again for your help and keep up the good work! I'll be glad to contribute if I run into suitable JIRA issue.
/Roger

Thanks for choosing NHibernate and thanks for your feedback. We would love to get more people involved. I will keep my eyes peeled on JIRA and post some entry-level issues on the forum here.

Roger, we have the same issue and implemented essentially the same kind of solution as you did. We created a helper class with an IsInitialized() method that detects if the property value is our wrapper collection class. When that is the case, instead of just calling NHibernateUtil.IsInitialized on the passed value, extract the otherwise-inaccesible NHibernate collection from the wrapper collection via reflection and call IsInitialized on that.

Nels_P_Olsen,

Thanks for your reply. Yes - it sounds like the way I solved it. Glad to hear that more people than me use the same work around :)