Hi guys,

I am trying to push the integration of NHibernate into our codebase. The codebase is relatively new based on DDD, and we have abstracted the data domain layer behind interfaces. We are very ALT.NET influenced, using NUnit, RhinoMocks and Castle Windsor amongst other tools.

We recently had to choose an ORM, where I was pushing for NHibernate - but when I tried to integrate NHibernate I came across the following issues:

1. All entity types in our business domain are immutable, where each type has public readonly fields. I found the only way to map to these entities was by having private readonly fields with public get properties. Is there any way to directly map to entities with public readonly fields?

2. Even when I reverted to changing all entity types to the form of having private readonly fields with public get properties, I encountered another problem. In our coding standards, all private class level fields are of the form field.camelcase-c-underscore e.g. "c_fieldExample". Diving into NHibernate code, there is a PropertyAssessorFactory that contains all the different strategies but "field.camelcase-c-underscore" is not in there. It is quite easy to manually update the PropertyAssessorFactory and create a new CamelCaseCUnderscoreStrategy class, however is there a better way to do this. Is there a way to inject your own strategy?

3. Default constructor. I am forced to include a default constructor in all of my entity types. I read previously in Ayendes blog that a patch for fixing this issue. Is there any way of not having to include the default constructor?

Help would really be appreciated as we are currently using LINQ to SQL (temporary due to enforced deadline), which we want to swap out as soon as possible.

For the constructor issue: you can create a private default constructor on the entity types that do not have a default constructor, and for which you don't want to expose a public default constructor.

By making the default constructor private, consumers of your entities will not be able to construct an instance of that entity using the private constructor (it will not even be visible by intellisense i guess), but, since there is a default constructor (although it is private), NHibernate has the ability to use it. :)