Hi all

Being a totally newbie to Hibernate on the .NET platform I have a question about the above scenario.

I have a client (winform)
I have some webservices
I have a data access layer serverside (based on Hibernate)

So when I invoke a webmethod to get a list of all customers, hibernate fetches those and streams them right back to the client through the web service.
Then I edit a given customer, eg changes the name, and calls another webmethod, eg UpdateCustomer.
How does hibernate track changes?
Does it store the complete object, or does it somehow know, what properties, references, composites have been changed and needs updating/creating?

Are there any best practices using this scenario? It differs from the scenario from the previous posts (regarding sessions) in that there's a WS layer between hibernate and the client.
I don't need to care about hibernate in my client (winform), right? as the client always invokes webmethods, right?

Thanx in advance for your feedback.

Regards

Henrik

NHibernate has two caches:
a Session-level cache (1st level) and a SessionFactory-level cache (2nd level). (cf. NHibernate.Caches)
These caches are used to track changes (among other things).

In your case, you will probably use two different sessions to load and save your customer. It means that only the 2nd level cache can give NHibernate the information it needs to find the changes.

By default, update commands are compiled when creating the SessionFactory; it means that when you save an entity all its properties are sent to the database.
You can enable "dynamic-update" to ask NHibernate to create a specific update command for each case (and with only the changed properties).

Finally, as you said, your client should not be aware of NHibernate (and even the persistence strategy)... Anyway, it depends of your requirements.