Question

I have a very simple object models.

public class Contact
{
    public virtual int Id                { get; set; }
    public virtual string Name           { get; set; }
    public virtual Device Device         { get; set; }
    public virtual IList<string> Numbers { get; set; }

    public Contact()
    {
        Numbers = new System.Collections.Generic.List<string>(3);
    }
}

As you can see, the class Contact has an association with Numbers, which is a list of strings.

Here’s the mapping:

        Id(x => x.Id).GeneratedBy.Assigned();
        Map(x => x.Name);
        References(x => x.Device, "DeviceId");
        Table("Contacts");
        HasMany(x => x.Numbers)
            .Table("ContactNumbers")
            .Element("Number")
            .KeyColumn("ContactId")
            .LazyLoad()
            .Cascade.All()
            .Not
            .Inverse();

Note that I can’t and don’t want the collection to be inverse=true, because it’s just a collection of string. This means that Contact is responsible for updating Numbers entries.
Now my problem is that, whenever I try to add a new number to an existing Contact, it deletes all associated numbers and recreates them individually. Isn’t NHibernate smart enough to detect changes and update only changed items?

I think there should be a simple solution for my problem but don’t know what.

Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

This is actually documented in NHibernate’s documentation.

Bags are the worst case. Since a bag permits duplicate element values
and has no index column, no primary key may be defined. NHibernate has
no way of distinguishing between duplicate rows. NHibernate resolves
this problem by completely removing (in a single DELETE) and
recreating the collection whenever it changes. This might be very
inefficient.

Try using an <idbag> mapping instead, and create a surrogate primary key for that table. Unfortunately, looks like <idbag> is not yet supported in FluentNHibernate.

Also, take a look at other collection mapping options.