Hi

I have a problem with Nhibernate, lazy loading and the JavaScriptSerializer that comes as part of the Ajax toolkit.
If I load an object which is marked as Lazy using something like session.load as in below:



Then it will not serialize due to a circular reference.
But if I use the code:



Then all is good. I am taking a performance hit on this and would like to be able to serialize proxied objects.

Is this possible or are there any steps I can take to help me achieve serialization?

has anybody been through this?

Cheers
Paul

AFAIK, you cannot serialize stuff that has circular refererence. This has nothing to do with nhibernate.

2nd as you might know, session.load() only loads an uninitialized proxy. If you want an initialized proxy you need to use session.get() or Initialize method of NHibernate (or NHibernate.Utils can't remember)

Finally it is not a good practice to send your domain objects on the wire. You should instead use Data Transfer Objects which are merely wrappers to your domain entities. This will prevent circular references and you will have fully loaded object (including the lazy collections) depending on how you implement the DTO's.

If it was indeed a circular reference then how come when the object does not dervie from the proxy it serializes?

Also could you elaborate on this DTO wrapper.

I am not sure of how this would benefit things.

Thanks

Paul