Question

I have a database with a field ‘LS_GENDER’ which stores genders as ‘M’ or ‘F’.

My application uses an enumeration called Gender to work with genders.

My entity has the following field and property:

private string _gender;

public Gender Gender { get { return GetGenderFromString(_gender); } };

private Gender GetGenderFromString(string strGender)
{
  switch (strGender.ToLower())
  {
    case "f":
      return Gender.Female;
    case "m":
      return Gender.Male;
    default:
      return Gender.Unknown;
  }
}

How do I map this with FluentNHibernate? I am trying to use field access (as shown below):

Map(x => x.Gender).Column("LS_GENDER").Access.CamelCaseField(Prefix.Underscore);

but I’m getting the error ‘Can’t parse F as Gender’. I think NHibernate is getting confused because the property and field are not of the same type.

How should I map this?

Answer 1

You map a private field using reveal:

Map(Reveal.Member<ClassType>("_gender")).Column("LS_GENDER");

But that doesn’t resolve your LINQ problem because now NHibernate doesn’t know about the Gender property. To resolve both issues I would use a custom user type that implements IUserType.