Question

How should one go about setting up seed data while developing an nhibernate web application? (It’s Mvc)

Should I just create a method and have it fire during application load (when it debug mode), and simply comment it out when I don’t need it?

or is there a better way?

Answer 1

I suggest looking at something like AutoPoco.

AutoPoco replaces manually written object mothers/test data builders
with a fluent interface and an easy way to generate a large amount of
readable test data. By default, no manual set-up is required,
conventions can then be written against the names/types of property or
manual configuration can be used against specific objects.

The primary use cases are

• Creating single, valid objects for unit tests in a standard manner across all tests
• Creating large amounts of valid test data for database population

This is not tied directly to NHibernate – you could in theory combine it with any data-layer that can persist POCO’s.

I’d avoid adding code to Application_Start though – that sounds like a recipe for accidentally trashing your production database. You’d be better off creating a simple console application that you can run whenever you want to reseed your database.