ICompositeUserType documentation indicates that

/// A ICompositeUserType may be used in almost every way
/// that a component may be used. It may even contain many-to-one
/// associations.

I have tried creating an ICompositeUserType containing (or emulating) many-to-one associations. I did this by having NullSafeSet save a foreign key and type and NullSafeGet load this information and use this to create and return an entity using session.InternalLoad( TypeName, ForeignKey, true, false ).

For the most part this works. However the entities referenced through this composite type are also referenced elsewhere through a many-to-one relationship. When I load the composite type and therefore the referenced entities they are not placed in the PersistenceContext EntitiesEntry and later when the same entities are loaded through other many-to-one relationship new instances are created (thus I have duplicate instances when I should have just one)

I think this might be because cascades are not occurring into ICompositeUserType elements (in particular when used as a type on an element in a map or list).

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to correctly use ICompositeUserType to persist out entities? I have a number of use cases where we would like to persist properties that are essentially entities (or composites of entities) but cannot be persisted correctly using NHibernate default mechanisms.

Hi Benjamin
I am facing issues loading collection in complex domain object typically one-to-many relation as mentioned in the post below. Since I think you had a similar issue could you help us know if you have solved this problem or is your problem different from what we are facing.

http://forum.hibernate.org/viewtopic.php?t=990195