Generating NHibernate Persistent Objects

NHibernate is a port of the Hibernate Core for Java to the .NET Framework. It handles persistent POCOs (Plain Old CLR Objects) to and from an underlying relational database.

All the common .NET idioms, including association, inheritance, polymorphism, composition, and the collections framework are supported. NHibernate allows you to express queries in its own portable SQL extension (HQL), as well as in native SQL, or with Criteria and Example objects.

PowerDesigner supports the design of .NET classes, database schema, and Object/Relational mapping (O/R mapping). Using these metadata, PowerDesigner can generate NHibernate persistent objects including:

• Adding NHibernate Support
  PowerDesigner provides a NHibernate Extended Model Definition to generate NHibernate persistent files.
• Defining Class Mappings
  There are two kinds of classes in NHibernate:
• Defining Association Mappings
  NHibernate supports one-one, one-to-many/many-to-one, and many-to-many association mappings. The mapping modeling is same with standard O/R Mapping Modeling. However, NHibernate provides special options to define its association mappings, which will be saved into <Class>.hbm.xml mapping file. PowerDesigner allows you to define standard association attributes like Container Type class, role navigability, array size and specific extended attributes for NHibernate association mappings.
• Defining Inheritance Mappings
  NHibernate supports the two basic inheritance mapping strategies:
• Generating Code for NHibernate
  Before generating code for NHibernate, you must have NHibernate 1.0.2 or higher installed.

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Created October 7, 2009. Send feedback on this help topic to Sybase Technical Publications: pubs@sybase.com