While not directly related to NHibernate, this question is related to architectures/applications within which NHibernate is used. I am working on a system where an NHibernate DAL is exposed via a web service to be used by a web application, and am wondering what the best approach is for implementing DTOMapping functionality. I would like to avoid having to write (or generate) repetitive "Map DTO to entity"/"map entity to DTO" code, but am wondering if this would be possible with Reflection, and whether the time saved in development would be outweighed by the loss of performance from using reflection...

I've been unable to find a great deal of discussion on this elsewhere, which suggests that people hand crank/generate their code...

At some point we mapped everything against interfaces and generated custom proxies to make sure that lazy-loading wasn't propagated but at the end of the day, we just ditched the whole thing and went for a more service-oriented approach.

The crucial question you have to ask yourself is : do I want to expose my domain to my clients or do I want to expose functionality to my clients.


We went for the latter and it fits the bill (thank $deity for WCF though).

YMMV though, we don't always have the same needs.

Cheers!