What is best practices for "Search screens"
I have parent object Blog and childs Post.
On search screen i want to show brief information only Blog.Title and Post.CreatedBy,Post.CreateDate.

1.HQL does not help since it return ArrayList,i need column names and etc
2.Use ICriteria.IList and transform to flat DataTable (think the best choice)
3.Write flat class with mapping (not OOP)

What you guys using??? This was just an example. I need all kind of search
screens specially for Winform. Winform DataGridView not allow bind to child fields (column bind to Bind.Posts.Post)

Thanks

I actually use QBE (query by example) and a generic search form.

Basically, I have a Form whose constructor takes a type. Also, I use custom attributes on my classes to mark the properties that I want to be searchable and listable.

So, to perform searching, all I have to do is create an instance of my SearchBox class, and pass the type of object I want to search for. The SearchBox then builds the text boxes and labels based on my custom attributes and shows itself to the user. When the user clicks the search button, the SearchBox calls my data layer which then calls NHibernate to perform a query by example. The resulting list is then displayed in a DataGridView. The user can then choose from the DataGridView and the chosen object is exposed as a property of the SearchBox back to the calling code.

It wasn't that hard at all, and now whenever I need to prompt the user, I can do it with 3 or 4 lines of code.

--Brian

Pelton can you explain how you are handling the result set to datagridview process? I always end up flattening the data to do this which sucks.

thanks

Another thing i want to try is create Views and create objects form views only. Do you guys think its good idea???
But then im missing Access database which kind of support Views(called Queries).

Any other ideas???

Look like nobody use search screens

I have an application that fills an ASP.NET 2.0 gridview with data fed by CreateCriteria.List, session.Find or IQuery.List. I must admit that I've not yet tried it with results from different databasetables and joins.

You can easily bind arraylists to a gridview. All you have to do is define the columns and set their datafield to the property name of your transfer objects.
For example:

(This is of course a simplified example)

If you use WinForms, it's also very simple. Use a DataGridView to display your results. Also set the AutoGenerateColumns to false and if you use the "edit columns" window, you can set the DataPropertyName to the name of the property you need in that column. You just need to set the DataSource property to the ArrayList returned by the query...

Sean: You can use objectviews. ObjectViews is like a dataview but for objects and handles inline objects well. Give it a try at http://sourceforge.net/projects/objectviews

Hector Cruz