Have a 'nice' idea for a feature for NHibernate, might need to wait until post-2.0 though...

One thing we seem to be missing is a the ability to persist an object or collection within an entity; I know we have component, but that's slightly different in that it still persists on a property-per-column basis and what I want is the ability to bundle up a sub-graph of an object and store it into a database column, either as XML or binary.

You can see this pattern mentioned in most of the Ambler papers (plus Fowler), but I haven't see a framework that does it yet.

I've got one project at the moment where it would solve a bunch of problems;  have a parent-children structure where the children are owned by the parent and have a coupled lifespan. Now, what we need to do is version the parent so that changes to the parent's properties or to a child cause a new version of the parent to be created. I've got this working fairly nicely with just a parent object using a view that delivers the latest and instead-of triggers to write the underlying object, but this gets much more complicated when you introduce a child table.

Comments?

Paul

 

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