What is Castle proxy factory in NHibernate? What is its task? What does proxy mean in this case?
Share
Sign Up to our social questions and Answers Engine to ask questions, answer people’s questions, and connect with other people.
Login to our social questions & Answers Engine to ask questions answer people’s questions & connect with other people.
Lost your password? Please enter your email address. You will receive a link and will create a new password via email.
Please briefly explain why you feel this question should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this answer should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this user should be reported.
What is Castle proxy factory in NHibernate? What is its task? What does proxy mean in this case?
Castle can be used (amongst others, you have the choice, you can also use LinFu, Spring.NET, …) to create dynamic proxies of your entities.
By default, NHibernate uses dynamic proxies to represent your entities; by doing so, it is able to return an object to you when you retrieve some entity from the DB, without all properties being populated. By using a dynamic proxy, it will only populate the entity once you really refer to a property.
(So it is some kind of lazy loading; not to be confused with lazy loading of collections / associations though).
This behaviour is the reason why NHibernate wants you to create every property as virtual by default: NHibernate will create a new class using this Castle (or LinFu, …) proxy provider which inherits from your entity, and it will override all the properties so that it can ‘inject’ the code that is necessary to retrieve the necessary data from the DB.
You can disable this behaviour by specifying ‘lazy=false’ in your entity mapping. (Although, I do think that even if you disable this feature, NHibernate will still require that you use one of the proxy factories).