Just pondering what Hibernate/NHibernate users think of filtering an in-memory collection?

Say, I have already loaded into memory an object Cat, and cat has a lot of kittens, and they are already loaded into memory.

What i want to do next is to just display in the grid only those kittens, which match some specific criteria, like, kitten name is like "joe".

How would you do that?

I wonder, is there a way to do that, hopefully having the same ICriteria API. I looked at documentation and see that CreateFilter is only for HQL, that's too bad

Filtering in memory is actually not the most brilliant idea. It sounds ok at first glance, but on having inspected it more thoroughly, i got that filtering in memory would produce more headache than pleasure.

I'm still though wondering what is the preffered way to filter association collections with ICriteria like API?

one workaround instead of using session.CreateFilter()

would be to use the same ICriteria statements, and add aditional filtering to filter cat


What do you think about this hack (it does not look like the right thing to do...)?

I assume you are talking about non-trivial filtering of the collection. The best bet to me at this point would be upgrade to Visual Studio 2008 and Linq when it is available (if you can). Linq works well to filter in-memory objects.

That's an idea, although i will not test it on our mission critical project :D

By the way, SharpDevelop3 works with .Net 3.5, so you can grab and test it, although at the current moment is very very unstable
http://community.sharpdevelop.net/blogs/laputa/archive/2007/11/19/net-framework-3-5-release.aspx