Question

I have some experience with NHibernate and I’m trying to get started with Castle Nhibernate Facilities OR Castle NhibernateIntegration. I’d like to know, where I can find a demonstration project of how to configure and perform transactional control (with attributes) in a service layer (business, class library project)? There is no documentation, and I have a really difficult to find some content to getting started.

I found some samples on the web but only with pieces of code and not the demonstration project… I would like to download something to study. I’m not finding to a complete solution, just the configuration and transactional control in business classes (class library).

Sorry for this kind of thread here, but I do know how to start.

Thank you!

Answer 1

If you want to see an full example of Castle Windsor integrating with nHibernate then I would check out Sharp Architecture

Sharp is an attempt at a ‘best practice’ template project and utilises a number of tech’s (Castle and nHibernate included). While some of the things it does may not be to your taste it will clearly show you one of the ways that it can all fit together.

You may need to go hunting into the source repository on GitHub if you want to see what is going on at a low level as Sharp uses it’s own base classes in the template project that are pre-compiled (tho its still open source so you can see what is going on if you want).

It was an invaluable help to me when I was putting my architecture together and I can honestly say that Castle and nHibernate are the way to go, so you are very much on the right track.

EDIT FOR COMMENT 1: Perhaps I am a little confused here. According to the Castle notes

Facilities are main way of extending the container. Using facilities
you can integrate container with external framework, like WCF or
NHibernate, add new capabilities to the container like event wiring,
transaction support… or to components (synchronization, startable
semantics…).

To the best of my knowledge both Castle Nhibernate Facilities and Castle NhibernateIntegration are Facilities and must be based on a container.

If you want to work without a container then you need to use some form of Singleton Factory to manage the SessionFactory. There is an example of this here.

In terms of attributes controlling Transactions then this is how Sharp does it (see here). You may get away with reusing this code and replacing NHibernateSession with your own Singleton like theirs.

You don’t need to implement UnitOfWork as nHibernate is effectively doing this for you. What you really need is an architecture that allows you to manage a transaction at a single point of control (Singleton) and is available in every repository.