Hi - I have a web application which is using a NHibernate 1.2 for its datalayer.

I have an entity reresenting users, but the database entity only contains a username. The username can be used to perform a lookup in Active Directory to retrieve the rest of the user information - firstname, surname, email, etc.

I would really like some way of running a "post-hibernate-load" action which will be looking up the remaining information in Active Directory.

I have investigated the ILifeCycle interface, but that would cause my domain object to be polluted with NHibernate, something that I must avoid.

Looking at the IInterceptor it seems that here I only have access to a "before-hibernate-load".

Any suggestions/strategies would be appreciated.

Cheers,
Thomas

The IInterceptor will work for you. I have used this type of approach in the past. Not for the exact reason you state, but we did use it to populate parts of an object from another source besides the main NHibernate query/load process.

The method you are looking for is the OnLoad method. It should look something like this:


Basically you have the entity being loaded (which would be your user object). You also have the id used to load the entity (probably what you need), you also have the state array which contains the property values being loaded from the database. For any property you need. Look in the propertyNames array, find the property you want and then use the index of that property on the state array to load the value you are looking for. If you need to know the NHibernate type that is also using the same index.

From that you should have all of the information you need to load things from Active Directory. This should work fine.[/code]

Hi - thanks for the reply. :-)

I hadn't considered using the OnLoad method like that.

So what you are saying is that I retrieve my keys for the Active Directory by looking in the arguments for the OnLoad method, fill the supplied entity with the data and then return "true" to indicate that I modified the entity.

Correct?

Cheers,
Thomas