[I submitted this originally with the patch attached and fell fowl of the 40k limit.  I then got a rejection with “No reason given” and wondered if that was automatic after a certain time.  If this isn’t the right list to be posting to, can you please point me in the right direction?  It seems like a development issue, but that’s not for me to judge.]

Dear All

We are using NHibernate for our main data-driven product and we have run into a problem that is causing us headaches.  A bit of background on our domain model, if I may:

We write patient records software for hospitals.  We have a Session class that represents the logged in user.  That user has a Role, e.g. consultant, which is a property of the Session.

All of our entities have a Session associated with them, which allows us to audit changes.  In particular, we list doctors in our system as a collection of Role entities, each of which has a Session.

A Role has a Location object as a member and that Location has a Session and an Address, the Address in turn having a Session.

The point of this is that a Role may represent both the user of the system and someone they would be interested in, say, assigning a task to, e.g. another doctor.

All that to say that there is circularity in the dependencies, although not necessarily in any given object graph, i.e. a Role has a Session which has a Role, etc.

We have run into problems because we are querying roles using the ICriteria API.  If I do this within an NHibernate session:

IQuery query = NHsession.CreateQuery("from Role role where role.PrimaryLocation.Address.Postcode like 'BS%'");

IList<Role> roles = query.List<Role>();

Assert.AreEqual(1, roles.Count);

all is well.

However, if I then do this:

ICriteria criteria = NHsession.CreateCriteria(typeof(Role));

criteria.CreateAlias("PrimaryLocation.Address", "primarylocation_address");

criteria.Add(Expression.Like("primarylocation_address.Postcode", "BS%"));

Assert.AreEqual(1, criteria.List().Count);

an exception is thrown saying that

The multi-part identifier "primaryloc1_.Postcode" could not be bound

Looking at the SQL generated for this query (which is very long) shows that it ends with

WHERE primaryloc1_.Postcode like ?

This is failing because the alias primaryloc1_ is never declared in the SQL.

We have debugged into the NHibernate source but are having trouble pinpointing the problem.  Does anyone on this list know where we should be looking?

I have written a breaking unit test in the NHibernate.Test-3.5 project which I can supply as a patch.

All help gratefully received.

Regards

Chris Smith