Hi All,

Is there any place where I can find documentation for using Attributes to map relations in NHibernate.

I m *grr* a newbie to NHibernate and been working for under a month. I find using .hbm files pretty easy, but want to move to using decorating classes with attribitues that do the mapping.

If anyone has any example and also how to start using them, like invoke them etc., please provide me with the relevant link.

The main things I would like to know are

declaring a class as persistant
1-1 mapping
1-many mapping
many-1 mapping
id
property
cascade

And also, is there any way i can get the intelli-sence to work with this? In some other place, i was suggested to copy a few schema files into .net shema directory

Many thanks

Sath

NHibernateEg may be a good start: http://nhibernate.sourceforge.net/NHibernateEg/

Note that the mapping with .NET attributes is similar with the mapping with XML; so if you read a mapping done in XML, you should be able to easily convert it in .NET attributes.

Here is a page refering to most articles/tutorials/samples/tools available on NHibernate: http://hibernate.org/365.html

And don't forget the official documentation of NHibernate.Mapping.Attributes: http://www.hibernate.org/hib_docs/nhibernate/html/mapping-attributes.html (it contains many useful tips...)

Personally, I'd prefer to keep my Entities totally agnostic about the data storage mechanism, which would mean the old school approach of using a seperate mapping assembly rather than embedding the mapping in your enties using attributes.

My viewpoint is that my current project requires that the repositories/data layer should be swappable for any data access that my project sponsors would wish to use in future... If this is not a concern, go ahead if you think it would make life easier.

My viewpoint is that .NET attributes are more like documentation than code; they do not influence your classes and you aren't forced to use them.

Note that it is recommended (in production) to generate (and save) a hbm.xml mapping file from the attributes (once the mapping no longer changes); and use this file to configure NHibernate; it will be slightly faster.