NHibernate 1.2
.Net 3.5
SQL Server 2005



I apologize for the title, I couldn't think of anything better.

If I need to tweak the schemas to accomplish my goals, that's fine.


Here are my questions.

1. How do I create many-to-many associations with just an ID?
For example:

assume the following schema


NOTE: mapping does not need to be bi-directional, Entity1 is the parent
NOTE2: I'm currenting using an ISet/HashedSet<> in the C# entity, but I'm completely flexible on this.
NOTE3: the association table has a composite PK to enforce unique elements in the set

if I want to insert an Entity1 record but I only have the id value of the entity2's, how would I go about doing this?


2. How do I create an ordered many-to-many association?

For example:

assume the following schema


NOTE: mapping does not need to be bi-directional, Entity3 is the parent
NOTE2: I'm mostly confused about the configuration
NOTE3: the association table has a composite PK to enforce unique elements in the set

I want to be able to order the children (Entity4).

Hopefully that's not confusing :(


I've looked through the NHibernate documentation and didn't come across anything dealing with either of these. If I just missed it, I'd love a link to the relevant section :)

Thanks for the help.

I solved question #2 by using an array (it was in the documentation, I just wasn't looking hard enough).

I'm still looking for #1 though. The child entity is guaranteed to exist at this stage, I just want to be able to add it to the parent without loading it from the DB (all I have is a list of integer ID's). Any hints on how to do that?

I solved question #2 by using an array (it was in the documentation, I just wasn't looking hard enough).

I'm still looking for #1 though. The child entity is guaranteed to exist at this stage, I just want to be able to add it to the parent without loading it from the DB (all I have is a list of integer ID's). Any hints on how to do that?