All XML mappings should declare the XML namespace shown. The actual schema definition may be found in the src\nhibernate-mapping.xsd file in the NHibernate distribution.

Tip: to enable IntelliSense for mapping and configuration files, copy the appropriate .xsd files to <VS.NET installation directory>\Common7\Packages\schemas\xml.

This element has several optional attributes. The schema attribute specifies that tables referred to by this mapping belong to the named schema. If specified, tablenames will be qualified by the given schema name. If missing, tablenames will be unqualified. The default-cascade attribute specifies what cascade style should be assumed for properties and collections which do not specify a cascade attribute. The auto-import attribute lets us use unqualified class names in the query language, by default. The assembly and namespace attributes specify the assembly where persistent classes are located and the namespace they are declared in.

<hibernate-mapping
         schema="schemaName"                          (1)
         default-cascade="none|save-update"           (2)
         auto-import="true|false"                     (3)
         assembly="Eg"                                (4)
         namespace="Eg"                               (5)
 />

If you are not using assembly and namespace attributes, you have to specify fully-qualified class names, including the name of the assembly that classes are declared in.

If you have two persistent classes with the same (unqualified) name, you should set auto-import="false". NHibernate will throw an exception if you attempt to assign two classes to the same "imported" name.

You may declare a persistent class using the class element:

<class
        name="ClassName"                              (1)
        table="tableName"                             (2)
        discriminator-value="discriminator_value"     (3)
        mutable="true|false"                          (4)
        schema="owner"                                (5)
        proxy="ProxyInterface"                        (6)
        dynamic-update="true|false"                   (7)
        dynamic-insert="true|false"                   (8)
        select-before-update="true|false"             (9)
        polymorphism="implicit|explicit"              (10)
        where="arbitrary sql where condition"         (11)
        persister="PersisterClass"                    (12)
        batch-size="N"                                (13)
        optimistic-lock="none|version|dirty|all"      (14)
        lazy="true|false"                             (15)
/>

It is perfectly acceptable for the named persistent class to be an interface. You would then declare implementing classes of that interface using the <subclass> element. You may persist any inner class. You should specify the class name using the standard form ie. Eg.Foo+Bar, Eg. Due to an HQL parser limitation inner classes can not be used in queries in NHibernate 1.0.

Immutable classes, mutable="false", may not be updated or deleted by the application. This allows NHibernate to make some minor performance optimizations.

The optional proxy attribute enables lazy initialization of persistent instances of the class. NHibernate will initially return proxies which implement the named interface. The actual persistent object will be loaded when a method of the proxy is invoked. See "Proxies for Lazy Initialization" below.

Implicit polymorphism means that instances of the class will be returned by a query that names any superclass or implemented interface or the class and that instances of any subclass of the class will be returned by a query that names the class itself. Explicit polymorphism means that class instances will be returned only be queries that explicitly name that class and that queries that name the class will return only instances of subclasses mapped inside this <class> declaration as a <subclass> or <joined-subclass>. For most purposes the default, polymorphism="implicit", is appropriate. Explicit polymorphism is useful when two different classes are mapped to the same table (this allows a "lightweight" class that contains a subset of the table columns).

The persister attribute lets you customize the persistence strategy used for the class. You may, for example, specify your own subclass of NHibernate.Persister.EntityPersister or you might even provide a completely new implementation of the interface NHibernate.Persister.IClassPersister that implements persistence via, for example, stored procedure calls, serialization to flat files or LDAP. See NHibernate.DomainModel.CustomPersister for a simple example (of "persistence" to a Hashtable).

Note that the dynamic-update and dynamic-insert settings are not inherited by subclasses and so may also be specified on the <subclass> or <joined-subclass> elements. These settings may increase performance in some cases, but might actually decrease performance in others. Use judiciously.

Use of select-before-update will usually decrease performance. It is very useful to prevent a database update trigger being called unnecessarily.

If you enable dynamic-update, you will have a choice of optimistic locking strategies:

We very strongly recommend that you use version/timestamp columns for optimistic locking with NHibernate. This is the optimal strategy with respect to performance and is the only strategy that correctly handles modifications made outside of the session (ie. when ISession.Update() is used). Keep in mind that a version or timestamp property should never be null, no matter what unsaved-value strategy, or an instance will be detected as transient.

Beginning with NHibernate 1.2.0, version numbers start with 1, not 0 as in previous versions. This was done to allow using 0 as unsaved-value for the version property.

Mapped classes must declare the primary key column of the database table. Most classes will also have a property holding the unique identifier of an instance. The <id> element defines the mapping from that property to the primary key column.

<id
        name="PropertyName"                      (1)
        type="typename"                          (2)
        column="column_name"                     (3)
        unsaved-value="any|none|null|id_value"   (4)
        access="field|property|nosetter|ClassName(5)">

        <generator class="generatorClass"/>
</id>

If the name attribute is missing, it is assumed that the class has no identifier property.

The unsaved-value attribute is almost never needed in NHibernate 1.0.

There is an alternative <composite-id> declaration to allow access to legacy data with composite keys. We strongly discourage its use for anything else.

<id name="Id" type="Int64" column="uid" unsaved-value="0">
        <generator class="NHibernate.Id.TableHiLoGenerator">
                <param name="table">uid_table</param>
                <param name="column">next_hi_value_column</param>
        </generator>
</id>

<id name="Id" type="Int64" column="cat_id">
        <generator class="hilo">
                <param name="table">hi_value</param>
                <param name="column">next_value</param>
                <param name="max_lo">100</param>
        </generator>
</id>

<id name="Id" type="Int64" column="cat_id">
        <generator class="seqhilo">
                <param name="sequence">hi_value</param>
                <param name="max_lo">100</param>
        </generator>
</id>

<id name="Id" type="String" column="cat_id">
        <generator class="uuid.hex">
            <param name="format">format_value</param>
            <param name="seperator">seperator_value</param>
        </generator>
</id>

<id name="Id" type="Int64" column="uid">
        <generator class="sequence">
                <param name="sequence">uid_sequence</param>
        </generator>
</id>

<id name="Id" type="Int64" column="uid" unsaved-value="0">
        <generator class="identity"/>
</id>

<composite-id
        name="PropertyName"
        class="ClassName"
        unsaved-value="any|none"
        access="field|property|nosetter|ClassName">

        <key-property name="PropertyName" type="typename" column="column_name"/>
        <key-many-to-one name="PropertyName class="ClassName" column="column_name"/>
        ......
</composite-id>

For a table with a composite key, you may map multiple properties of the class as identifier properties. The <composite-id> element accepts <key-property> property mappings and <key-many-to-one> mappings as child elements.

<composite-id>
        <key-property name="MedicareNumber"/>
        <key-property name="Dependent"/>
</composite-id>

Your persistent class must override Equals() and GetHashCode() to implement composite identifier equality. It must also be Serializable.

Unfortunately, this approach to composite identifiers means that a persistent object is its own identifier. There is no convenient "handle" other than the object itself. You must instantiate an instance of the persistent class itself and populate its identifier properties before you can load() the persistent state associated with a composite key. We will describe a much more convenient approach where the composite identifier is implemented as a seperate class in Section 7.4, “Components as composite identifiers”. The attributes described below apply only to this alternative approach:

The <discriminator> element is required for polymorphic persistence using the table-per-class-hierarchy mapping strategy and declares a discriminator column of the table. The discriminator column contains marker values that tell the persistence layer what subclass to instantiate for a particular row. A restricted set of types may be used: String, Char, Int32, Byte, Short, Boolean, YesNo, TrueFalse.

<discriminator
        column="discriminator_column"  (1)
        type="discriminator_type"      (2)
        force="true|false"             (3)
        insert="true|false"            (4)
        formula="arbitrary SQL expressi(5)on"
/>

Actual values of the discriminator column are specified by the discriminator-value attribute of the <class> and <subclass> elements.

The force attribute is (only) useful if the table contains rows with "extra" discriminator values that are not mapped to a persistent class. This will not usually be the case.

Using the formula attribute you can declare an arbitrary SQL expression that will be used to evaluate the type of a row:

<discriminator
    formula="case when CLASS_TYPE in ('a', 'b', 'c') then 0 else 1 end"
    type="Int32"/>

The <version> element is optional and indicates that the table contains versioned data. This is particularly useful if you plan to use long transactions (see below).

<version
        column="version_column"                            (1)
        name="PropertyName"                                (2)
        type="typename"                                    (3)
        access="field|property|nosetter|ClassName"         (4)
        unsaved-value="null|negative|undefined|value"      (5)
/>

Version numbers may be of type Int64, Int32, Int16, Ticks, Timestamp, or TimeSpan (or their nullable counterparts in .NET 2.0).

The optional <timestamp> element indicates that the table contains timestamped data. This is intended as an alternative to versioning. Timestamps are by nature a less safe implementation of optimistic locking. However, sometimes the application might use the timestamps in other ways.

<timestamp
        column="timestamp_column"           (1)
        name="PropertyName"                 (2)
        access="field|property|nosetter|Clas(3)sName"
        unsaved-value="null|undefined|value"(4)
/>

Note that <timestamp> is equivalent to <version type="timestamp">.

The <property> element declares a persistent property of the class.

<property
        name="propertyName"                 (1)
        column="column_name"                (2)
        type="typename"                     (3)
        update="true|false"                 (4)
        insert="true|false"                 (4)
        formula="arbitrary SQL expression"  (5)
        access="field|property|ClassName"   (6)
        optimistic-lock="true|false"        (7)
/>

typename could be:

Note that you have to specify full assembly-qualified names for all except basic NHibernate types (unless you set assembly and/or namespace attributes of the <hibernate-mapping> element).

NHibernate supports .NET 2.0 Nullable types. These types are mostly treated the same as plain non-Nullable types internally. For example, a property of type Nullable<Int32> can be mapped using type="Int32" or type="System.Int32".

If you do not specify a type, NHibernate will use reflection upon the named property to take a guess at the correct NHibernate type. NHibernate will try to interpret the name of the return class of the property getter using rules 2, 3, 4 in that order. However, this is not always enough. In certain cases you will still need the type attribute. (For example, to distinguish between NHibernateUtil.DateTime and NHibernateUtil.Timestamp, or to specify a custom type.)

The access attribute lets you control how NHibernate will access the value of the property at runtime. The value of the access attribute should be text formatted as access-strategy.naming-strategy. The .naming-strategy is not always required.

An ordinary association to another persistent class is declared using a many-to-one element. The relational model is a many-to-one association. (It's really just an object reference.)

<many-to-one
        name="PropertyName"                                (1)
        column="column_name"                               (2)
        class="ClassName"                                  (3)
        cascade="all|none|save-update|delete"              (4)
        fetch="join|select"                                (5)
        update="true|false"                                (6)
        insert="true|false"                                (6)
        property-ref="PropertyNameFromAssociatedClass"     (7)
        access="field|property|nosetter|ClassName"         (8)
        unique="true|false"                                (9)
        optimistic-lock="true|false"                       (10)
        not-found="ignore|exception"                       (11)
/>

The cascade attribute permits the following values: all, save-update, delete, none. Setting a value other than none will propagate certain operations to the associated (child) object. See "Lifecycle Objects" below.

The fetch attribute accepts two different values:

A typical many-to-one declaration looks as simple as

<many-to-one name="product" class="Product" column="PRODUCT_ID"/>

The property-ref attribute should only be used for mapping legacy data where a foreign key refers to a unique key of the associated table other than the primary key. This is an ugly relational model. For example, suppose the Product class had a unique serial number, that is not the primary key. (The unique attribute controls NHibernate's DDL generation with the SchemaExport tool.)

<property name="serialNumber" unique="true" type="string" column="SERIAL_NUMBER"/>

Then the mapping for OrderItem might use:

<many-to-one name="product" property-ref="serialNumber" column="PRODUCT_SERIAL_NUMBER"/>

This is certainly not encouraged, however.

A one-to-one association to another persistent class is declared using a one-to-one element.

<one-to-one
        name="PropertyName"                                (1)
        class="ClassName"                                  (2)
        cascade="all|none|save-update|delete"              (3)
        constrained="true|false"                           (4)
        fetch="join|select"                                (5)
        property-ref="PropertyNameFromAssociatedClass"     (6)
        access="field|property|nosetter|ClassName"         (7)
/>

There are two varieties of one-to-one association:

Primary key associations don't need an extra table column; if two rows are related by the association then the two table rows share the same primary key value. So if you want two objects to be related by a primary key association, you must make sure that they are assigned the same identifier value!

For a primary key association, add the following mappings to Employee and Person, respectively.

<one-to-one name="Person" class="Person"/>

<one-to-one name="Employee" class="Employee" constrained="true"/>

Now we must ensure that the primary keys of related rows in the PERSON and EMPLOYEE tables are equal. We use a special NHibernate identifier generation strategy called foreign:

<class name="Person" table="PERSON">
    <id name="Id" column="PERSON_ID">
        <generator class="foreign">
            <param name="property">Employee</param>
        </generator>
    </id>
    ...
    <one-to-one name="Employee"
        class="Employee"
        constrained="true"/>
</class>

A newly saved instance of Person is then assigned the same primar key value as the Employee instance refered with the Employee property of that Person.

Alternatively, a foreign key with a unique constraint, from Employee to Person, may be expressed as:

<many-to-one name="Person" class="Person" column="PERSON_ID" unique="true"/>

And this association may be made bidirectional by adding the following to the Person mapping:

<one-to-one name="Employee" class="Employee" property-ref="Person"/>

The <component> element maps properties of a child object to columns of the table of a parent class. Components may, in turn, declare their own properties, components or collections. See "Components" below.

<component 
        name="PropertyName"                                (1)
        class="ClassName"                                  (2)
        insert="true|false"                                (3)
        upate="true|false"                                 (4)
        access="field|property|nosetter|ClassName"         (5)
        optimistic-lock="true|false"                       (6)
>
        
        <property ...../>
        <many-to-one .... />
        ........
</component>

The child <property> tags map properties of the child class to table columns.

The <component> element allows a <parent> subelement that maps a property of the component class as a reference back to the containing entity.

The <dynamic-component> element allows an IDictionary to be mapped as a component, where the property names refer to keys of the dictionary.

Finally, polymorphic persistence requires the declaration of each subclass of the root persistent class. For the (recommended) table-per-class-hierarchy mapping strategy, the <subclass> declaration is used.

<subclass
        name="ClassName"                              (1)
        discriminator-value="discriminator_value"     (2)
        proxy="ProxyInterface"                        (3)
        lazy="true|false"                             (4)
        dynamic-update="true|false"
        dynamic-insert="true|false">

        <property .... />
        .....
</subclass>

Each subclass should declare its own persistent properties and subclasses. <version> and <id> properties are assumed to be inherited from the root class. Each subclass in a hierarchy must define a unique discriminator-value. If none is specified, the fully qualified .NET class name is used.

Alternatively, a subclass that is persisted to its own table (table-per-subclass mapping strategy) is declared using a <joined-subclass> element.

<joined-subclass
        name="ClassName"                    (1)
        proxy="ProxyInterface"              (2)
        lazy="true|false"                   (3)
        dynamic-update="true|false"
        dynamic-insert="true|false">

        <key .... >

        <property .... />
        .....
</joined-subclass>

No discriminator column is required for this mapping strategy. Each subclass must, however, declare a table column holding the object identifier using the <key> element. The mapping at the start of the chapter would be re-written as:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<hibernate-mapping xmlns="urn:nhibernate-mapping-2.2" assembly="Eg"
    namespace="Eg">

        <class name="Cat" table="CATS">
                <id name="Id" column="uid" type="Int64">
                        <generator class="hilo"/>
                </id>
                <property name="BirthDate" type="Date"/>
                <property name="Color" not-null="true"/>
                <property name="Sex" not-null="true"/>
                <property name="Weight"/>
                <many-to-one name="Mate"/>
                <set name="Kittens">
                        <key column="MOTHER"/>
                        <one-to-many class="Cat"/>
                </set>
                <joined-subclass name="DomesticCat" table="DOMESTIC_CATS">
                    <key column="CAT"/>
                        <property name="Name" type="String"/>
                </joined-subclass>
        </class>

        <class name="Dog">
                <!-- mapping for Dog could go here -->
        </class>

</hibernate-mapping>

Collections are discussed later.

Suppose your application has two persistent classes with the same name, and you don't want to specify the fully qualified name in NHibernate queries. Classes may be "imported" explicitly, rather than relying upon auto-import="true". You may even import classes and interfaces that are not explicitly mapped.

<import class="System.Object" rename="Universe"/>

<import
        class="ClassName"              (1)
        rename="ShortName"             (2)
/>

To understand the behaviour of various .NET language-level objects with respect to the persistence service, we need to classify them into two groups:

An entity exists independently of any other objects holding references to the entity. Contrast this with the usual Java model where an unreferenced object is garbage collected. Entities must be explicitly saved and deleted (except that saves and deletions may be cascaded from a parent entity to its children). This is different from the ODMG model of object persistence by reachability - and corresponds more closely to how application objects are usually used in large systems. Entities support circular and shared references. They may also be versioned.

An entity's persistent state consists of references to other entities and instances of value types. Values are primitives, collections, components and certain immutable objects. Unlike entities, values (in particular collections and components) are persisted and deleted by reachability. Since value objects (and primitives) are persisted and deleted along with their containing entity they may not be independently versioned. Values have no independent identity, so they cannot be shared by two entities or collections.

All NHibernate types except collections support null semantics if the .NET type is nullable (i.e. not derived from System.ValueType).

Up until now, we've been using the term "persistent class" to refer to entities. We will continue to do that. Strictly speaking, however, not all user-defined classes with persistent state are entities. A component is a user defined class with value semantics.

The basic types may be roughly categorized into three groups - System.ValueType types, System.Object types, and System.Object types for large objects. Just like the .NET Types, columns for System.ValueType types can not store null values and System.Object types can store null values.

NHibernate supports some additional type names for compatibility with Hibernate (useful for those coming over from Hibernate or using some of the tools to generate hbm.xml files). A type="integer" or type="int" will map to an Int32 NHibernate type, type="short" to an Int16 NHibernateType. To see all of the conversions you can view the source of static constructor of the class NHibernate.Type.TypeFactory.

It is relatively easy for developers to create their own value types. For example, you might want to persist properties of type Int64 to VARCHAR columns. NHibernate does not provide a built-in type for this. But custom types are not limited to mapping a property (or collection element) to a single table column. So, for example, you might have a property Name { get; set; } of type String that is persisted to the columns FIRST_NAME, INITIAL, SURNAME.

To implement a custom type, implement either NHibernate.UserTypes.IUserType or NHibernate.UserTypes.ICompositeUserType and declare properties using the fully qualified name of the type. Check out NHibernate.DomainModel.DoubleStringType to see the kind of things that are possible.

<property name="TwoStrings" type="NHibernate.DomainModel.DoubleStringType, NHibernate.DomainModel">
    <column name="first_string"/>
    <column name="second_string"/>
</property>

Notice the use of <column> tags to map a property to multiple columns.

The ICompositeUserType, IEnhancedUserType, INullableUserType, IUserCollectionType, and IUserVersionType interfaces provide support for more specialized uses.

You may even supply parameters to an IUserType in the mapping file. To do this, your IUserType must implement the NHibernate.UserTypes.IParameterizedType interface. To supply parameters to your custom type, you can use the <type> element in your mapping files.

<property name="priority">
    <type name="MyCompany.UserTypes.DefaultValueIntegerType">
        <param name="default">0</param>
    </type>
</property>

The IUserType can now retrieve the value for the parameter named default from the IDictionary object passed to it.

Even though NHibernate's rich range of built-in types and support for components means you will very rarely need to use a custom type, it is nevertheless considered good form to use custom types for (non-entity) classes that occur frequently in your application. For example, a MonetaryAmount class is a good candidate for an ICompositeUserType, even though it could easily be mapped as a component. One motivation for this is abstraction. With a custom type, your mapping documents would be future-proofed against possible changes in your way of representing monetary values.

There is one further type of property mapping. The <any> mapping element defines a polymorphic association to classes from multiple tables. This type of mapping always requires more than one column. The first column holds the type of the associated entity. The remaining columns hold the identifier. It is impossible to specify a foreign key constraint for this kind of association, so this is most certainly not meant as the usual way of mapping (polymorphic) associations. You should use this only in very special cases (eg. audit logs, user session data, etc).

<any name="AnyEntity" id-type="Int64" meta-type="Eg.Custom.Class2TablenameType">
    <column name="table_name"/>
    <column name="id"/>
</any>

The meta-type attribute lets the application specify a custom type that maps database column values to persistent classes which have identifier properties of the type specified by id-type. If the meta-type returns instances of System.Type, nothing else is required. On the other hand, if it is a basic type like String or Char, you must specify the mapping from values to classes.

<any name="AnyEntity" id-type="Int64" meta-type="String">
    <meta-value value="TBL_ANIMAL" class="Animal"/>
    <meta-value value="TBL_HUMAN" class="Human"/>
    <meta-value value="TBL_ALIEN" class="Alien"/>
    <column name="table_name"/>
    <column name="id"/>
</any>

<any
        name="PropertyName"                                (1)
        id-type="idtypename"                               (2)
        meta-type="metatypename"                           (3)
        cascade="none|all|save-update"                     (4)
        access="field|property|nosetter|ClassName"         (5)
        optimistic-lock="true|false"                       (6)
>
        <meta-value ... />
        <meta-value ... />
        .....
        <column .... />
        <column .... />
        .....
</any>