I have a Contact class, comprised of ContactID, Name, Age, Prefix, Suffix, Email, Phone, Fax, etc., and I want to bind a list of all the contacts to a dropdown (DataTextField=Name, DataValueField=ContactID).

I can bind the dropdown datasource to "session.CreateCriteria(typeof(Contact)).List();", but that is inefficient as all of the fields are being returned.

I can use "session.Find("select c.ContactId, c.Name from Contact c");" to retrieve only the 2 fields needed to bind to the dropdown. But since this is just a generic IList, I would get error "DataBinding: 'System.Object[]' does not contain a property with the name 'Name'."

Another option is to create another class, say ContactLookup with only the ContactID and Name fields are mapped. But I rather not to have to create a derivative class just for binding to a dropdown.

Is there a more efficient and elegant solution?

Many thanks in advance.

Hi,

I think you have provided all the options yourself.

Personally, I would just take option 1 and only optimize using option 3 *if* performance testing / user experience shows that getting all the columns is causing you grief.

It's probably far more likely that you will have more pressing performance issues in totally different parts of your application.

'Premature optimization is the root of all evil' etc etc

Cheers,

Adam.