I'm trying get NHibernate to work with tables that are not normalized properly (and I can't do anything about it)

Here is a sample table:

CONTACT1
NAME, ... ADDRESS1, ADDRESS2, ADDRESS3, CITY, STATE, ZIP, ... PHONE1, PHONE2, PHONE3

I'm having trouble dealing with the multiple ADDRESS fields and the multiple PHONE fields, for different reasons.

The Address fields I want to role up into a class that contains:

Address
---------
Street
City
State
Zip

So I basically want to concatenate the 3 Address fields with a line break between them and put it in the "Street". Another comparable solution would be to use collection of "Streets" for each Address.

The second problem are the phone numbers.

I want them each in there own class of:

PhoneNumber
Number


I know I could solve these using a view on the backend, but I'm trying to get this done within NHibernate. If it makes a difference, this application only reads the data, it does not write it back.

I'm very new to Hibernate and I'm trying to wrap my head around all of this. I've read the documentation on hibernate.org... if anyone can point me in the right direction I'd be very appreciative.

Thanks,
Patrick

You should look at using components in the nhibernate/hibernate 2.1 documentation.

Basically, a component allows you to use a finer grained class model than a one-one mapping between tables and classes. You can make a contact contain one address object (with the fields you mention) and three phone classes using components.

Thanks for the reply. I read over the component documentation and I still cannot see how that helps me in this situation. Can someone please explain a litte more?

Thanks,
Patrick

I believe you need to write your own custom type to map the 3 address fields to a street property and also use Component as already stated in a previous post.

Your mapping could be something like this:

<component name='Address1' class='eg.Address'>
<property name='Street' type='eg.CustomAddressType'>
<column name='Address1 />
<column name='Address2 />
<column name='Address3 />
</property>
<property name='City' />
<property name='State' />
<property name='Zip' />
</component>

Please read the doc for more info.

Thanks samujab!

I modified the DoubleStringType example slightly to TripleStringType to allow the "Street" to work the way I want. Ideally I'd like to have this type dynamically size itself based on the number of columns, but its working for now.


However I still don't have a clue how to get the three PHONE fields each into their own class. Anybody else?

Thanks!
Patrick