NCharlie – Simple Persistence with Fluent NHibernate

Now that I have the domain objects (Board, Column and Task) built up and tested, it is time to wire them up to a database.  I want to create them, click Save, go home and play Wii with my boys… then come back the next day to find them persisted, waiting for me to work with them again.

I’m going to keep this part really simple… because it should be.  The days of writing stored procedures, or ADO.Net connection, command, execution and mapping code are dead to me.  At least here in the NCharlie project they are!

First, I’ll give credit where credit is due… The folks at Headspring have contributed lots of code to the community through open source projects like CodeCampServer.  The following simple data access code, and most of the NCharlie starter project, comes from the example project Jimmy Bogard used at his MVC boot camp course in January.  Check out the NCharlie source to see the configuration files and base classes that make the following simple mapping code possible.

Here’s a test showing that I want to persist a Board entity to a database:

Here’s a mapping class that makes the test pass:

That’s all that’s needed to get the Board entity saved.  I really like the simple syntax used here… no strings like “Name” or “CommunityId” in this code.

I wanted to keep it short and simple here… I did add some other persistence features (cascading updates/deletes, joins.)  You can check out the code (which includes mapping code for the other entities) in the source branch tagged 2010-0218-persistence.