http://www.codeproject.com/aspnet/NHibernateBestPractices.asp
In March of 2006 I published my initial thoughts on NHibernate best practices with ASP.NET, generics and unit tests. I've been delighted to learn that these ideas have been implemented in a number of real-world scenarios with strong success. Since then, I've worked with many people to refine these ideas, learn from mistakes and leverage a more powerful version of NHibernate. Accordingly, although only a modest, yet important, amount of modification has been made to the underlying architecture, some other important factors have been updated and addressed in this article:
A quick thanks goes out to those who have implemented my ideas in their own work and have given plenty of ideas for improvement and consideration! Now onto the 1.2nd edition...
[Author's Note: The following is an excerpt taken from a book I tinker with in my "spare" time.]
"As we look to the horizon of a decade hence, we see no silver bullet. There is no single development, in either technology or management technique, which by itself promises even one order-of-magnitude improvement within a decade in productivity, in reliability, in simplicity."
These prophetic words were put forth by Frederick Brooks' in his now legendary paper, No Silver Bullet, in 1986. Heeding Brooks' words to a tee, it wasn't until more than a decade later, in 1997, that the software world was presented with a hint of an upcoming silver bullet in the form of NeXT's Enterprise Object Framework...one of the first object-relational mappers (ORM). Although not regularly conspicuously stated – often to avoid being seen as a heretic of software dogma – it is commonly accepted by many that ORM technologies, when used correctly, are, in fact, a silver bullet for software development. With the maturation of NHibernate, the ORM silver bullet has been formally introduced to the world of .NET.
The most common dissenters of ORM technologies, in general, are developers using Microsoft technologies. (As I've placed myself squarely into this realm for the past decade or so, I feel quite comfortable bringing us up first!) There seems to be an unwritten rule that "if it wasn't invented by Microsoft, then wait until Microsoft puts out the right way to do it." Stepping up to the plate, Microsoft intends to do just that with "LINQ to Entities" in the upcoming C# 3.0. (Yes, officially discard the use of "ObjectSpaces" and "DLINQ.") Developers may continue to wait for this technology or, alternatively, start realizing the benefits of ORM immediately. To be fair, the not-invented-by-Microsoft toolset for .NET developers used to be sparse but has been steadily growing since the advent of .NET. Circa 2004, the "not created by the mothership" toolset of open source tools finally began to reach a respectable level of maturity and should be seriously considered for any .NET endeavor. (And since, statistically, the majority of software projects fail, it sounds like the consideration of an expanded toolset is certainly warranted.) The impending introduction of LINQ certainly brings great benefits to flexible querying. Fortunately, LINQ is not exclusive to Microsoft data-access layers and LINQ for NHibernate is already well underway by Ayende Rahien.
Other dissenters of these technologies suggest that ORMs kill application performance and only provide a significant improvement to productivity in the initial stages of development. Furthermore, the argument continues, is that the use of an ORM becomes a serious detriment to project success only later in the project, when issues of performance and maintainability begin to have a more noticeable effect. Three obvious retorts come to mind in response to these protests.
First and foremost, in support of ORMs, using a framework such as NHibernate increases your performance as a developer. If you can spend 90% less time (yes, I said "90% less time") on developing data access code, then quality time can be spent improving the domain model and tuning performance – assuming it becomes necessary. Furthermore, leveraging a simple profiling tool goes a long way towards implicating the 5% of code that's causing 95% of the performance bottleneck. And in the cases in which the data access layer is the bottleneck, simple adjustments can usually be made to reap substantial improvements. Incidentally, this is no different than when not using an ORM. (Be sure to check out Peter Weissbrod's introductory article to profiling NHibernate applications.) And in the very few situations in which the ORM framework is the bottleneck and can't be adjusted for improvement, it's trivially simple to bypass the ORM altogether if the data access layer has been properly abstracted.
Secondly, NHibernate, specifically, provides an incredible amount of control over all aspects of data-loading behavior. This has positive effects on developer productivity, application scalability, and application stability. Caching is certainly available – but this is readily available in non-ORM solutions as well. Other out-of-the-box features include lazy loading, support for inheritance, declaration of immutable classes, loading of read-only properties, support for generics, stored procedures, blah blah blah. The point is that all these powerful features have been proven in real-world scenarios and, therefore, have removed many hours of developing, debugging and tweaking a custom data access layer. (And if you really feel the need to get into the code, that's just fine since NHibernate's an open source project.)
Finally, I would argue that those who feel that ORMs like NHibernate become maintenance headaches later in a project are working with a coding architecture that would inhibit the maintenance of any data access layer. Just because I've suggested that NHibernate is a silver bullet doesn't imply that it eliminates the need for proper application design. With the proper amount of judicious, architectural forethought, NHibernate is quite possibly the most maintainable solution for tying a .NET application to a database.
Needless to say, NHibernate, like other ORM tools, has alleviated the maintenance of thousands of lines of code and stored procedures, thus allowing developers to focus more attention on the core of a project: its domain model and business logic. Even if you automatically generate your ADO.NET data-access layer using a tool such as CodeSmith or LLBLGen Pro, NHibernate provides the flexibility in decoupling your domain model from your relational model. Your database should be an "implementation detail" that is defined to support your domain model, not the other way around. The remainder of this article focuses on describing best practices for integrating NHibernate into ASP.NET using well established design patterns and "lessons learned from the field".
This article assumes a good understanding of C# and NHibernate, knowledge of the Data Access Object / Repository pattern, and at least a basic familiarity with Generics. Note that this article does not focus on using NHibernate but, instead, on integrating NHibernate into ASP.NET applications. If you're just getting acquainted with NHibernate, I'd recommend reading these two great introductions at TheServerSide.net: Part 1 and Part 2. (Also keep an eye out for Pierre Kuate's forthcoming NHibernate in Action.) For an extensive overview of the Data Access Object pattern, which is leveraged heavily within the samples, go to J2EE's BluePrints catalog. Although I use the phrase "Data Access Object" (or "DAO") throughout, it is interchangeable with Eric Evans' "Repository" in Domain-Driven Design. I just find "DAO" more convenient to type!
In building solid data integration within an ASP.NET 2.0 application, we aim to achieve the following objectives:
Two sample applications have been included, demonstrating the use of NHibernate with ASP.NET while meeting the above objectives:
What follows now is a description of how each of the aforementioned design objectives has been tackled in the sample applications. But before getting into the implementation details, let's skip right to the chase and get the sample up and running.
The sample application, at the risk of being terribly cliché, utilize the Northwind database within SQL Server 2005 to view and update a listing of Northwind customers. To demonstrate the use of lazy-loading, the application also displays the orders that each customer has made. All you need to run the samples locally is IIS with the .NET 2.0 Framework installed, and SQL Server 2005 (or 2000) containing the Northwind database. (Since SQL Server 2005 doesn't come with Northwind by default, you can simply backup the Northwind DB from 2000 and restore it into 2005.) The samples also port to SQL Server 2000...simply modify the NHibernate configuration settings, accordingly.
To get the basic NHibernate sample application up and running:
Steps for getting the "enterprise" sample up and running are discussed in Extending the Basics to an "Enterprise" Solution. But before that, now that you're able to follow along with the basic sample in front of you, we'll examine how the application was developed to meet our design objectives...
When developing an application, my primary goals are to:
This section discusses using these design principles for the integration of NHibernate into ASP.NET applications. We'll do this by dissecting the internals of the Basic NHibernate Sample.
The basic sample should not, necessarily, be seen as a reusable framework for your own ASP.NET application. The focus within this example application is on presenting NHibernate integration in a simple and concise manner. If you are looking for a "ready for the real-world" architecture, be sure to take a look at Extending the Basics to an "Enterprise" Solution after reviewing this section. With that said, the basic sample does present a number of best practice techniques and design patterns:
Separated Interface, also known as Dependency Inversion, is a technique for establishing a clean separation of concerns between application tiers. This technique is described by Martin Fowler, by Object Mentor, and in further detail in Robert Martin's Agile Software Development. The technique is often used for cleanly separating a data access layer from a domain layer. For example, assume a Customer object - in the domain layer - needs to communicate with a data access object (DAO) to retrieve a number of past Orders. (Whether or not the domain layer should ever communicate directly with a DOA is left for another discussion.) Consequently, the Customer object has a dependency on the Order DAO - in the data layer. But for the Order DAO to return orders, the DAO requires a dependency back to the domain layer.
The simplest solution is to put the data layer, containing the DAOs, into the same physical assembly as the domain layer. To maintain a "virtual" separation of concerns, the containing project could include two folders, one named Domain and the other named Data. (I've actually used this approach on a good-sized project, in a former life, with regrettable consequences.) This approach brings with it a number of ill effects:
Alternatively, the domain and data layers could be placed into physically separate assemblies; e.g., Project.Core and Project.Data, respectively. The domain layer (the Project.Core assembly) would contain domain objects and DAO interfaces. The data layer (the Project.Data assembly) would contain concrete implementations of the DAO interfaces defined in the domain layer. This is shown in the package diagram below. Note that the arrow signifies a uni-directional dependency from the data layer to the domain layer.
This clean separation brings with it a number of benefits:
An implementation example of Separated Interface is included in the sample applications and is discussed further below.
Separated Interface, as described above, introduces a dilemma: how are the concrete DAO implementations given to the domain layer which only "knows" about interfaces? Dependency Injection, also known as Inversion of Control (IoC), describes the technique for doing this. With Dependency Injection, it's possible to remove many direct instantiations of concrete objects along with the inflexibility that comes along with calling the new
keyword directly. Dependency Injection may be performed manually or via an IoC Container. The manual approach is performed by simply passing an object's "service dependencies" to it via its constructor or via property setters. I've written an introduction to this approach within the CodeProject article, Dependency Injection for Loose Coupling. (Note that a "service dependency" may be a DAO, an emailing utility, or anything that leverages external, expensive, or shouldn't-be-used-in-unit-test resources.) This manual approach is most useful within unit tests because the explicitness of passing concrete dependencies is helpful in describing functionality. (Martin Fowler has some wise words on the value of being explicit.) Alternatively, dependency injection may be performed via an IoC Container driven by code or XML. (Fowler has also written a great introduction to IoC Containers, service locators and making an appropriate choice between the two.) Think of IoC Containers as providing decoupling on steroids. The benefits of an IoC Container include a flexible, loosely-coupled framework and an increased emphasis on coding-to-interface. The drawback is an added layer of complexity within the application. This is one of the many trade-offs between flexibility and complexity which needs to be considered when developing an application. Here are two great tools for putting IoC Containers into practice:
I've found that using an IoC Container is most useful outside of unit tests for enabling ASPX pages to be given dependencies, to avoid ever having to call the new
keyword directly. This may be taken further to wire up dependencies within a presenters-layer or service layer, as well.
Design-by-Contract (DBC) is quite simply the best way to never have to use the debugger again. Although infrequently discussed, this technique should be given the same amount of praise that test-driven development receives. (Not that I'm saying that DBC gets jealous, but it should.) It increases quality, reduces checks for null, reduces debugging time, and greatly improves the overall stability of an application. To be more technically descriptive, DBC is a technique for contractually obligating users of your code (which is usually you, yourself) to use methods and properties in a particular way and for those methods and properties to promise to successfully carry out the given request. If the contract is not followed, an exception is thrown. It may seem a bit drastic at first, but it goes a long way to improving code quality. With DBC, "pre-conditions" assert what contractual obligations must be adhered to when invoking a method or property. "Post-conditions" assert what contractual obligations have been ensured. I highly recommend reading an introduction to Design-by-Contract; you'll be hooked on using it very quickly. The sample projects included with this article use a modified DBC class originally written by Kevin McFarlane. The original allows conditional compilation for turning contracts on for debug mode and off for release mode while the variation included in this article's samples maintains contractual obligations regardless of compilation mode. In my opinion, a contract is always a contract and the behavior should never vary.
In the code, you'll find that pre-conditions are declared with Check.Require
while post-condition are declared with Check.Ensure
. As DBC is not domain-specific, this class is appropriately pulled out into a reusable, utilities library in the "enterprise" sample.
So what are we working with here? The basic application fulfills the following user stories:
Regardless of how valuable this application may or may not be, the above user stories are enough to demonstrate the primary aspects of NHibernate integration. To assist with keeping logical tiers loosely coupled, the included sample application is split into four projects: Tests, Web, Core and Data. As a policy, I use <ProjectName>.<LayerName> for naming projects; e.g., BasicSample.Data. Although this simple separation of concerns will work for now, a more realistic architecture will be discussed later. In peeling the layers of the onion, let's begin with the testing layer and work our way towards the simple presentation layer.
I'll assume you can probably guess what this project is for. In the first edition of this article, unit testing was only lightly discussed. As industry, and personal, experience has proven, test-driven development is a pivotal factor in producing high quality products which are more adaptable to change. Furthermore, taking a test-driven approach tends to produce better designs and, as a side effect, creates a lot of perfectly valid technical documentation. For a terrific beginner's introduction to a "day in the life" of test-driven development, take a look at Kent Beck's Test-Driven Development: By Example. Examining the unit tests of the sample application provides an overview of how the application is structured and what functionality is available. After taking a look at the unit tests, we'll delve further into the code they test.
It's imperative for unit tests to be blazing fast. If a suite of unit tests takes too long to run, developers stop running them - and we want them running unit tests all the time! In fact, if a test takes more than 0.1 second to run, the test is probably too slow. Now, if you've done unit testing in the past, you know that any unit test requiring access to a live database takes much longer than this to run. With NUnit, you can put tests into categories, making it easy to run different groups of tests at a time, thus excluding the tests that connect to a database most of the time. But at the very least, these "slow" tests should be run every night within a Continuous Integration environment. Here's a quick example of categorizing an NUnit, unit test:
[TestFixture]
[Category("Database Tests")]
public class SomeTests
{
[Test]
public void TestSomethingThatDependsOnDb() { ... }
}
For simplicity, the domain layer of this application is light, to say the least. But even in the lightest of domain layers, it's important to have, at a minimum, every non-exception path covered by a unit test. The domain layer tests may be found in the namespace BasicSample.Tests.Domain
. (As a side, is it overkill that CustomerTests.CanCreateCustomer
tests the getter/setter of almost every property? It's startling how many trivial bugs you catch in the process.) While reviewing the tests, you may notice the class DomainObjectIdSetter.cs; the motivations for this class will be discussed later.
To run the unit tests, open NUnit, go to File/Open Project and open BasicSample.Tests/bin/Debug/BasicSample.Tests.dll. To prevent the more time-consuming tests from running, go to the Categories tab within NUnit and double-click both "Database Tests" and "Web Smoke Tests." Additionally, click "Exclude these categories" at the bottom. Now, when you run the unit tests, only the domain logic tests will run and not be slowed down by HTTP and database access tests. For such a small application, the added overhead of the "slow" tests is almost negligible, but can add many minutes to running the unit tests of larger apps.
Before getting into simulating the database layer, it should be noted that a nomenclature exists for describing different types of simulated services. Dummies, fakes, stubs and mocks are all used to describe different types of simulated behavior. An overview of the differences highlights a few which will be included in Gerard Meszaros' upcoming XUnit Test Patterns. Meszaros offers "test double" to generically describe any of these behaviors. Stubs and mocks are two such test doubles demonstrated in the sample code.
Unless you're specifically testing DAO classes, you usually don't want to run unit tests that are dependent on a live database. They're slow and volatile by nature; i.e., if the data changes, the tests break. And when testing domain logic, unit tests shouldn't break if the database changes. But the major obstacle is that domain objects themselves may depend on DAOs. Using the abstract factory pattern that is in place in the sample (discussed later), and the associated DAO interfaces, we can inject DAO test doubles into the domain objects, thereby simulating communications with the database. An example is included in the test CustomerTests.CanGetOrdersOrderedOnDateUsingStubbedDao
. The following snippet, from the unit test, creates the DAO stub and injects it into customer
via a public setter. Since the setter only expects an implementation of the IOrderDao
interface, the stub DAO easily replaces all of the live-database behavior.
Customer customer = new Customer("Acme Anvils");
customer.ID = "ACME";
customer.OrderDao = new OrderDaoStub();
As an alternative to writing DAO stubs, which are generally static by nature and often amount to quite a bit of "not implemented" code, it is also possible to mock the DAO using a tool such as Rhino Mocks or NMock. Either selection works perfectly well, but Rhino Mocks invokes methods in a strongly typed manner as opposed to using strings, as NMock does. This makes its usage compile-time checked and assists with renaming properties and methods. The test CustomerTests.CanGetOrdersOrderedOnDateUsingMockedDao
demonstrates using Rhino Mocks 3.0 to create a mocked IOrderDao
. Although setting up a mocked object appears more complicated than setting up a stub, the added flexibility and greatly reduced "not implemented" code are convincing benefits. The following code, found in the class MockOrderDaoFactory.cs, shows how IOrderDao
is mocked with Rhino Mocks. It essentially creates a "static" mock, or stub, in the fact that it doesn't matter what is passed in for arguments; it'll always return the same example orders created by TestOrdersFactory
. But mocking with Rhino Mocks isn't limited to dumb reflexes, such as this, and can be as variably responsive as required.
public IOrderDao CreateMockOrderDao() {
MockRepository mocks = new MockRepository();
IOrderDao mockedOrderDao = mocks.CreateMock<IOrderDao>();
Expect.Call(mockedOrderDao.GetByExample(null)).IgnoreArguments()
.Return(new TestOrdersFactory().CreateOrders());
mocks.Replay(mockedOrderDao);
return mockedOrderDao;
}
Unfortunately, more often than not, you're maintaining legacy code that has no semblance of the ideal "code-to-interface" that allows for such test-double injection. Usually, there are many explicit dependencies to concrete objects, and it is difficult to replace data-access objects with test doubles to simulate a live database. In these situations, your options are to either refactor the legacy code to fit within a test harness, or to use an object mocking tool such as TypeMock. With TypeMock, it is even possible to mock sealed and singleton classes - an impressive feat to pull off without such a tool. Albeit powerful, TypeMock is best left alone unless absolutely needed; using TypeMock prematurely makes it tempting to not code to interface. The more appropriate course to take when working with legacy code - time and budget permitting - is to refactor the code for greater flexibility. Working Effectively with Legacy Code by Michael Feathers is full of great ideas for refactoring legacy code into a test harness.
In the previous edition of this article, NHibernate's ISession
was stored and retrieved solely via System.Runtime.Remoting.Messaging.CallContext
. Although perfectly fine for WinForms and NUnit tests, this is a very bad idea for ASP.NET as the ISession
may be "lost" under load. (These two articles provide further explanation for why using CallContext
in ASP.NET applications is a bad idea.) For proper integration with ASP.NET applications, the ISession
should be stored in HttpContext.Current.Items
; but doing so forces you to simulate an HTTP context when running unit tests. It also prevents the framework from easily porting to WinForms. A better approach is to use the proper repository when appropriate. So if a web context is available, then use HttpContext
; otherwise, use CallContext
. Implementation details of this combined approach are discussed later. (A thanks goes out to the many people in the article comments that raised this concern.) Take a look at BasicSample.Tests/Data/CustomerDaoTests.cs for unit tests that are HTTP-agnostic with respect to how the ISession
is managed. As a side, as you'll see in the unit test, unless you want data changes made within your tests to be committed to the database, it's a good idea to rollback the transaction.
As demonstrated in the sample, it's possible to create a generic DAO that works for any persistent object. (Details of which will be discussed later.) This leads to the discussion of what should be tested and how should it be done? Should each concrete DAO be fully tested? How is the test data maintained? Personal experience suggests these guidelines:
CustomerDao
class which inherits from the generic DAO and then extend it with an additional method, such as GetActiveCustomers()
, then a unit test should be written to test this extension method. TestFixtureSetUp
, and other setup/teardown methods, are OK to run while still being able to consider the test to have run in isolation. When the domain layer was tested, test doubles were used to simulate NHibernate communications with the database. Similarly, it's handy at times to use this same approach when testing the presentation layer. Suppose you're working on an ASP.NET project with a dedicated "creative" team. The creative folks, with their black turtlenecks, are in charge of developing the look and feel of the application. While they're working on the graphical layout, you shouldn't be hindered to develop a presentation layer for viewing domain-logic & data-access results and for getting client feedback, while still being able to put off decisions such as master-page setup, security enforcement, and other presentation-specific decisions. In another scenario, suppose you're working on a number of complicated business rules which you'd like the client to be able to verify without having to write a few dozen unit tests to encapsulate each minor variation. FIT (Framework for Integrated Test) is a tool for developers to fake the presentation layer very quickly and provide for a more collaborative effort between developers and project stakeholders. As the Fit site states, this is done "to learn what the software should do and what it does do. It automatically compares customers' expectations to actual results." Arguably, a tool such as this isn't "basic" and isn't required for testing NHibernate; but the importance of test-driven development needs to be emphasized and a tool such as Fit, when used appropriately, is just as applicable to software quality as NUnit.
For viewing Fit test results, you can use WinFITRunnerLite, which runs Fit tests in a Windows client similar to NUnit, or FitNesse, which provides a web-based wiki for modifying test inputs and viewing Fit test results. Although it takes a little more setup, FitNesse provides a very flexible framework for allowing clients to participate in validating coding logic and application workflow. The following screenshot shows a simple example of the output you'd expect to see from running a calculator test with FitNesse:
Although implementation examples of Fit tests are beyond the scope of this article, my hope is that you'll get interested in learning more about this powerful framework. In addition to the websites listed previously, extensive information concerning the use of Fit and FitLibrary, an extension to Fit, may be found in Fit for Developing Software by Rick Mugridge and Ward Cunningham.
At this point, we've unit tested the domain layer and the data-access layer and learned about testing with a rough presentation layer, using Fit, for getting clients more involved. It's now time to test the ASPX pages themselves. NUnitAsp is a class library for performing these types of unit tests. Although you can get rather sophisticated using NUnitAsp with your WebForms testing, I find that NUnitAsp is best for running "smoke tests" from the continuous integration server to verify that no page is blatantly breaking. Taking NUnitAsp further than this tends to result in a lot of maintenance of the associated unit testing code. Since these HTTP unit tests are slow by nature, they're rarely run and, consequently, lightly maintained; therefore, they should be kept as simple as possible. BasicSample.Tests/Web/WebSmokeTests.cs demonstrates a sampling of these unit tests. Although trivially simple, these smoke tests go a long way towards verifying that your presentation layer is responsive, that database communications are working correctly, and that NHibernate HBMs are, for the most part, error-free. As an added bonus, if the smoke tests are directed at the production environment immediately after a deployment, they serve to pre-load all the ASPX pages for a more responsive experience for the very next visitor. You should include a smoke test for every URL-accessible web page in your application. To help organize them, create a separate test class for each grouping of smoke tests. For example, all the smoke tests for an admin section of the website would be found in a file called AdminSmokeTests.cs.
The BasicSample.Core project contains the domain model and NHibernate HBM files. This project also contains interfaces, describing the data access objects, in the BasicSample.Core.DataInterfaces
namespace. (Arguably, the HBM files logically belong in the BasicSample.Data assembly, but the maintenance convenience of having the HBM files physically close to the domain objects they describe far outweighs this break in encapsulation.)
You'll notice that the BasicSample.Core project does not contain implementation details of data access objects, only interfaces describing the services it needs. The concrete DAO classes, which implement these interfaces, are found within BasicSample.Data. As described previously, this technique is called Separated Interface. If you consider BasicSample.Core to be an "upper-level layer" and BasicSample.Data to be a "lower-level layer", then, as Robert Martin describes, "each of the upper-level layers declares an abstract interface for the services that it needs. The lower-level layers are then realized from these abstract interfaces. ... Thus, the upper layers do not depend on the lower layers. Instead, the lower layers depend on abstract service interfaces declared in the upper layers".
To see this in action, the data interfaces are described in the namespace BasicSample.Core.DataInterfaces
. IDao
is a generic interface for providing typical data access functionality. IDaoFactory
then acts as an interface for one or more DAO factory classes. Coding to the IDaoFactory
interface allows you to create one concrete DAO factory for production code, and another concrete DAO factory for returning DAO test doubles for unit testing purposes. (This is an example of using the abstract factory pattern.) And as previously examined in BasicSample.Tests, leveraging mock objects in unit tests provides a means for testing a single responsibility at a time.
By far, one of the greatest benefits that C# 2.0 has brought to the table is the inclusion of generics. With generics, more code reuse can be effectively realized while still enforcing strongly typed coding "contracts". In the previous edition of this article, Ayende's very useful, but deprecated, NHibernate.Generics was used to integrate NHibernate with .NET generics. But now that NHibernate 1.2 natively supports generics, this class library is no longer necessary. If you've used Ayende's library in the past, you've got a bit of work ahead of you to completely migrate away from it, especially if you used the automatic wiring for managing parent/child relationships. But don't let this stop you as you can still upgrade to NHibernate 1.2 without having to immediately refactor out the automatic wiring...but you'll still want to do so sooner rather than later. More information about the steps required to refactor away from Ayende's NHibernate.Generics is found below in Migrating from NHibernate 1.0x to 1.2. A drawback to Ayende's NHibernate.Generics was that internal collections needed to be exposed with both getters and setters. This broke encapsulation and allowed collections to be manipulated or modified in unintended ways - think of it as collection harassment. Now that NHibernate supports generics natively, better collection encapsulation techniques may be employed. The following code from Customer.cs and Customer.hbm.xml shows a better encapsulation of generic collections.
public IList<Order> Orders {
get { return new List<Order>(orders).AsReadOnly(); }
protected set { orders = value; }
}
public void AddOrder(Order order) {
if (order != null && !orders.Contains(order)) {
orders.Add(order);
}
}
public void RemoveOrder(Order order) {
if (orders.Contains(order)) {
orders.Remove(order);
}
}
private IList<Order> orders = new List<Order>();
<bag name="orders" table="Orders" inverse="true" cascade="all">
<key column="CustomerID" />
<one-to-many class="BasicSample.Core.Domain.Order, BasicSample.Core" />
</bag>
Setting the orders collection setter to protected
allows NHibernate to populate the collection without having to depend on a private member directly and without having to expose the setter publicly. Alternatively, the NHibernate setting access="field"
could be used to set a private member directly, but the use of this should be carefully considered and only used when warranted. In the sample code above, note what AddOrder
and RemoveOrder
have done to the Customer
class. They've shamelessly polluted the class by adding collection management concerns to the containing class. Imagine the headache this would turn into if Customer
ended up having a number of collections along with methods for managing each one. In instances like this, it's usually best to employ a custom collection.
As a simple example of using a custom collection, the Supplier
class may have a number of Product
items associated with it. The caveat is that NHibernate needs to map to an IList
collection; consequently, two collections are maintained. The first is the products collection itself, which NHibernate is aware of, and the second is a products collection wrapper which exposes the custom collection. The following code from Supplier.cs and Products.cs demonstrates this.
// Within Supplier.cs...
public Products Products {
get {
if (productsWrapper == null) {
productsWrapper = new Products(products);
}
return productsWrapper;
}
}
private Products productsWrapper;
// NHibernate binds directly to this member by the access="field" setting
private IList
products = new List<Product>();
// Within Products.cs
public Products(IList
products) {
this.products = products;
}
public void Add(Product product) {
if (product != null && !products.Contains(product)) {
products.Add(product);
}
}
private IList
products;
Although simplistic, the example code should cover most of your custom collection needs. But in some cases, a full-blown generic, custom collection is required. One of the most common scenarios includes creating a custom collection which implements BindingList
. In these types of situations, it's necessary to leverage NHibernate's IUserCollectionType
. A good example of implementing this may be found here.
In BasicSample.Core, each persistable domain object inherits from DomainObject
. This class handles most of the work involved with comparing two domain objects for equality. (A detailed discussion of this object may be found in a devlicio.us blog post.) DomainObject
is also a generic class which accepts a data type declaring the ID type of the domain object. This generic property provides the ability to have one domain object which uses a string
as an ID, such as Customer
, and another to have a long
as an ID, such as Order
. It should be duly noted that in the previous edition of this article, the ID property had both a public getter and setter. Although the getter is essential, the public setter opened Pandora's box for corrupting existing data. Assume you retrieved a customer from the database and accidentally set its ID to another customer's ID. When the customer gets saved back to the database, its data overwrites that of the other customer. For a more subtle example, assume the Customer
class is being used as a pseudo DTO being returned from an edit screen. With a public ID setter, the developer sets the ID and the applicable properties and returns it to another object which takes care of transferring the DTO information to the "real" customer pulled from the database. Mind you, both the DTO and the "real" customer are being passed around as instances of Customer
. So if, during maintenance, a developer doesn't realize that the Customer
being returned from the view should be treated as a DTO and not as a "real" customer, and proceeds to invoke save on it directly, then it's quite probable that a lot of live customer data has been lost since it was overwritten with the sparse DTO data. The primary weakness behind this is the fact that ID had a public setter. Therefore, it is best that a domain object's ID only be set by NHibernate when loading an object from the database and is hidden from public setting. But there are situations wherein a domain object has an assigned ID. (Personally, I find no place for assigned IDs and avoid them whenever possible, but understand that an argument can be made for their use. You can find a further rant in BasicSample.Web/AddCustomer.aspx.) For situations when an assigned ID is required, an interface is included called IHasAssignedId
. This interface defines a method for setting the ID. So although it provides a doorway for setting the ID, it requires a bit more thought concerning its use and provides a good spot for including ID-assignment business logic. The following snippet exemplifies this within the Customer
class.
public class Customer : DomainObject<string>, IHasAssignedId<string>
{
public void SetAssignedIdTo(string assignedId) {
Check.Require(!string.IsNullOrEmpty(assignedId),
"assignedId may not be null or empty");
// As an alternative to Check.Require,
the Validation Application Block could be used for the following
Check.Require(assignedId.Trim().Length == 5,
"assignedId must be exactly 5 characters");
ID = assignedId.Trim().ToUpper();
}
...
}
An obvious drawback to not exposing a public ID setter is that this property becomes essentially unusable to the unit testing framework, unless NHibernate is used to load the object. To skirt this problem, the class BasicSample.Tests/Domain/DomainObjectIdSetter.cs enables you to set the ID of domain objects, even if they do not implement IHasAssignedId
. This ability opens many testing possibilities without having to provide a public setter to the ID property. On the flipside, using reflection to set private members, for the benefit of unit tests, should be seen as a non-standard practice and used only when absolutely necessary. It adds complexity and is fragile since it is string based. But for setting the ID property of domain objects, it's a perfect fit for the unit testing layer.
NHibernate provides two means of mapping domain objects to the database: HBMs using XML and mapping attributes. The primary advantage of HBM-XML files is that they are physically separated from the domain objects they describe. This enables the domain objects to remain as POCOs (plain old C# objects), relatively oblivious to how they are associated with the database. But keeping the mapping information separated from the domain objects may also be seen as the primary disadvantage of HBMs in that it requires additional maintenance effort to keep switching between HBMs and the classes they map. (Some people also loathe using XML.) Mapping attributes, on the other hand, are intimately connected to the domain objects and are generally less verbose than their HBM equivalents. Using mapping attributes makes the domain objects more akin to Active Records than POCOs. (For true Active Record support, consider using Castle Project's ActiveRecord.) Besides "dirtying" up the domain objects, mapping attributes require a reference to NHibernate.Mapping.Attributes which makes the domain layer a bit less data-access-provider agnostic. On the other hand, do you often find yourself switching out data-access layers completely, anyway? But as a general rule, the domain layer should remain as data-access-provider agnostic as is practical for the design goals of the application. When it comes right down to it, it's a matter of personal preference when deciding between HBMs or mapping attributes. Regardless, when starting a new project, it should be decided which technique will be used; mixing the techniques may lead to confusion as it may not be clear which objects are mapped and which are not. The sample application demonstrates using HBMs for the mapping solution. The following snippet - not found in the sample application - shows an example of using mapping attributes instead of HBMs. Additional information concerning mapping attributes may be found in the NHibernate docs.
[NHibernate.Mapping.Attributes.Class]
public class Customer
{
[NHibernate.Mapping.Attributes.Property]
public string FirstName { ... }
...
}
A new capability that NHibernate 1.2 brings to the table is support for nullable types. Previously, a reference to Nullables.NHibernate supported nullable types, but it is no longer needed. There's no need to treat nullable property mappings, within the HBMs, any differently than other property mappings; simply map the nullable property as you would any other. NHibernate is smart enough to transfer null
between the database and the nullable property it maps to. Take a look at BasicSample.Core/Domain/Order.cs for an example of using a nullable DateTime
. Although support for nullables is now trivially simple to implement, it should only be used after careful consideration. My own experiences have led me to hardly ever create columns in the database which allow null. In my opinion, mapping null to primitive types has little meaning within the database nor within the domain layer. Nullable DateTime
properties are about the only exception that come to mind. Obviously, there are plenty of valid situations for using null
with non-primitive relationships; but even then, use of the Null Object pattern is a great alternative to checks for null
scattered about the code.
NHibernate 1.2's support for stored procedures is a critical addition to this framework's capabilities. But what's so great about integrating with stored procs if all the CRUD is already taken care of by NHibernate? Two reasons: working with legacy databases and performing reporting queries. Creating a stored procedure to return query-intensive reporting data is the optimal way for polling the database. To illustrate, the Northwind database maintains orders placed by each customer. Assume you need to return the quantity of each product ever ordered by a specific customer. The class BasicSample.Core/Domain/HistoricalOrderSummary.cs is a value object which encapsulates this summary information. Note that this class does not inherit from DomainObject
and does not have a corresponding HBM file. This is considered an "unmanaged" class from NHibernate's perspective, not to be confused with unmanaged C#. The file HistoricalOrderSummary.hbm.xml declares a named query which makes a call to the stored procedure CustOrderHist
for returning the needed reporting data. (Details of how this data is converted into domain objects will be discussed next, while dissecting the BasicSample.Data project.)
Providing capabilities for interacting with stored procedures brings up the issue of deciding what should be performed by stored procedures and what should be performed by the domain layer. As an alternative to the stored proc, to meet the previously stated requirements, the C# code could have retrieved all the orders placed by the given customer, looped through all of them and summed the quantity of each product. But it was clear that having SQL Server perform this summing was far more efficient; imagine if the customer had placed thousands of orders. If, on the other hand, performance analysis had shown little difference in efficiency between letting the domain layer do the work vs. a stored procedure, then go with the domain layer to do the work. You'll find that this will lend itself to a more complete domain-driven design and better reusability of the resulting code. As is frequently encountered during development, this is a balance between better domain-driven design and optimized performance ... always lean towards the domain until a bottleneck is discovered. (As mentioned in the introduction, see Peter Weissbrod's article for an introduction to identifying NHibernate related bottlenecks.) Incidentally, the first NHibernate project I was involved with, which was about 50,000 LOC, required about six stored procedures in all to help optimize the data-querying capabilities. This should serve to illustrate how much you can put into the domain layer without taking an appreciable hit to performance.
The BasicSample.Data project contains the concrete DAOs and implementation details for communicating with the database and managing NHibernate sessions.
The DAO factory and generic DAO objects have been implemented as NHibernateDaoFactory
and AbstractNHibernateDao
, respectively. With a few key modifications, these are C# ports of the Java versions described in detail at Hibernate's website. I highly recommend reviewing this article in detail. (Note that a bug has been fixed from the previous edition of this article wherein calling CommitChanges()
, when a transaction was not being used, was not flushing the session; see AbstractNHibernateDao.CommitChanges
for the fixed code. Additionally, due to NHibernate 1.2's native support of generics, DAO list results may now be retured directly without first going through a convert-to-generic-list process.) The most impressive thing to note, by using a generic DAO, is that it takes just a few lines of code to create a full-blown DAO ready for use:
Looking at the ICustomerDao
/CustomerDao
example in the basic sample application, it took about five lines of code to define the interface and implement the concrete DAO ... not too bad.
Occasionally, it's necessary to extend the abstract, generic DAO with specialty methods. The interface BasicSample.Core/DataInterfaces/IOrderDao.cs defines one such example. In this case, the domain layer needs the orders-DAO to return all the orders found within a given date range. For manageability, any DAOs which extend the abstract DAO should be placed in their own file and not declared inline as ICustomerDao
was. Likewise, this also applies to the concrete implementation demonstrated with BasicSample.Data/OrderDao.cs.
While examining the BasicSample.Core project, we encountered HistoricalOrderSummary.hbm.xml which declared a named query to communicate with a stored procedure for the purposes of retrieving reporting data. In the BasicSample.Data project we find the concrete DAO, HistoricalOrderSummaryDao.cs. This DAO includes the following code to invoke the named query, receive the results, and pass each returned row into the constructor of the value object, HistoricalOrderSummary
. The key is the call to SetResultTransformer
which informs NHibernate how to translate the results into a new instance of HistoricalOrderSummary
. Review the NHibernate documentation to learn about other available options for this translation procedure.
IQuery query = NHibernateSession.GetNamedQuery("GetCustomerOrderHistory")
.SetString("CustomerID", customerId)
.SetResultTransformer(
new NHibernate.Transform.AliasToBeanConstructorResultTransformer(
typeof (HistoricalOrderSummary).GetConstructors()[0]));
At the core of integrating with NHibernate is BasicSample.Data/NHibernateSessionManager.cs. This thread-safe, lazy singleton performs the following duties:
ISession
factory when instantiated for the first time. The class is a singleton because building the session factory is very expensive. In the previous edition of this article, an application setting within web.config declared which assembly contained the HBM files. This is not necessary. Instead, the mapping attribute should be included in the hibernate-configuration
. For example, web.config includes the following declaration, within the NHibernate configuration settings, letting NHibernate know where to find the HBMs: <mapping assembly="BasicSample.Core" />
. Besides being a cleaner approach than using an application setting, this lends itself better towards managing multiple databases concurrently. ISession
. Examples include creating/closing the current ISession
, registering an IInterceptor
(which needs to be done, incidentally, before a transaction is begun), and managing transactions. ISession
. There are various ways to manage the life-cycle of the ISession
; one such approach, called "Open Session in View," is presented shortly. NHibernateSessionManager
does not dictate when the ISession
needs to be created and destroyed, but it does dictate how the ISession
is stored. In the previous edition of this article, CallContext
was used as the sole means for storage. This is a very bad idea for ASP.NET applications. The corrected approach leverages HttpContext
when it is available and CallContext
when it is not. Although this forces you to include a reference to System.Web, this enables seamless portability between WebForms and WinForms. Incidentally, NUnit tests work like a WinForms application, and, thus, benefit from this portability. The following code, pulled from NHibernateSessionManager
, demonstrates switching between the appropriate context and is worth showing in its entirety:
private ITransaction ThreadTransaction {
get {
if (IsInWebContext()) {
return (ITransaction)HttpContext.Current.
Items[TRANSACTION_KEY];
}
else {
return (ITransaction)CallContext.GetData(TRANSACTION_KEY);
}
}
set {
if (IsInWebContext()) {
HttpContext.Current.Items[TRANSACTION_KEY] = value;
}
else {
CallContext.SetData(TRANSACTION_KEY, value);
}
}
}
private ISession ThreadSession {
get {
if (IsInWebContext()) {
return (ISession)HttpContext.Current.Items[SESSION_KEY];
}
else {
return (ISession)CallContext.GetData(SESSION_KEY);
}
}
set {
if (IsInWebContext()) {
HttpContext.Current.Items[SESSION_KEY] = value;
}
else {
CallContext.SetData(SESSION_KEY, value);
}
}
}
private bool IsInWebContext() {
return HttpContext.Current != null;
}
private const string TRANSACTION_KEY = "CONTEXT_TRANSACTION";
private const string SESSION_KEY = "CONTEXT_SESSION";
The basic flow for retrieving a session is as follows:
NHibernateSessionManager.Instance.GetSession()
. ISession
factory, loading HBM mapping files from the appropriate assembly. GetSession
looks to see if an ISession
is already bound to the appropriate context. ISession
is not found, then a new one is opened (bound to an optional IInterceptor
) and stored back to the appropriate context. GetSession
then returns the context-specific ISession
. This flow, as well as the rest of NHibernateSessionManager
, follows that closely described in Hibernate in Action, chapter 8 - Writing Hibernate Applications. We'll next see where the session and/or transaction is begun and committed.
As expected, the BasicSample.Web project contains application configuration and ASPX pages. In this sample, the code-behind pages act as controllers, communicating with the domain and data access layers directly. This is not best practice, MVC separation - code-behind pages should be seen as part of the view, pure and simple. But for now, it's simple, and serves well for the demonstration. (The "enterprise" sample application, discussed later, shows a better example of keeping business logic out of the code-behind pages using Model-View-Presenter. Castle MonoRail and Maverick.NET are two other options for separating logic from views, as well. There's even talk of a Microsoft-backed MVC framework in the works. But I digress...)
Here's a closer look at some of the more interesting bits of BasicSample.Web...
If you want to leverage NHibernate's lazy-loading (which you most certainly will), then the Open-Session-in-View pattern is the way to go. ("Session" in this context is the NHibernate ISession
...not the ASP.NET Session
object.) Essentially, this pattern suggests that one NHibernate session be opened per HTTP request. Although session management within the ASP.NET page life-cycle is clear in theory, various implementation approaches may be used. The approach I've taken is to create a dedicated IHttpModule
to handle the details of the pattern. Aside from centralizing session management responsibilities, this approach provides the additional benefit that we may implement the Open-Session-in-View pattern without putting any session management code into our ASPX pages.
To see how this has been implemented, take a look at BasicSample.Web/App_Code/NHibernateSessionModule.cs. The following section is then included in web.config to activate the IHttpModule
:
<httpModules>
<add name="NHibernateSessionModule"
type="BasicSample.Web.NHibernateSessionModule" />
</httpModules>
The IHttpModule
opens a transaction at the beginning of a web request, and commits/closes it at the end of the request. The following is an example of modifying the IHttpModule
so that an IInterceptor
gets bound to the session as well as being contained within a transaction:
public void Init(HttpApplication context) {
context.BeginRequest +=
new EventHandler(InitNHibernateSession);
...
}
private void InitNHibernateSession(object sender, EventArgs e) {
IInterceptor myNHibernateInterceptor = ...
// Bind the interceptor to the session.
// Using open-session-in-view, an interceptor
// cannot be bound to an already opened session,
// so this must be our very first step.
NHibernateSessionManager.Instance.RegisterInterceptor(
myNHibernateInterceptor);
// Encapsulate the already opened session within a transaction
NHibernateSessionManager.Instance.BeginTransaction();
}
Even if not used, there's very little overhead associated with opening/closing the transaction as NHibernate doesn't actually open a database connection until needed. (With that said, there's room for improvement and a point-of-susceptibility with this approach; see Where to go from here? for areas of further research.) Other strategies that you may want to consider are opening a session not associated with a transaction - hey, it works for eBay - and/or registering an IInterceptor
with the NHibernate session. (Using an IInterceptor
is great for auditing. See Hibernate in Action, section 8.3.2 - Audit Logging, for more details.)
There are two key settings within web.config to optimize NHibernate: hibernate.connection.isolation
and hibernate.default_schema
. By default, NHibernate uses IsolationLevel.Unspecified
as its database isolation level. In other words, NHibernate leaves it up to the ADO.NET provider to determine what the isolation level is by default. If the provider you're using has a default isolation level of Serializable
, this is a very strict level of isolation that can be overkill for most application scenarios. A more reasonable setting to start with is ReadCommitted
. With this setting, "reading transactions" don't block other transactions from accessing a row. However, an uncommitted "writing transaction" blocks all other transactions from accessing the row. Other provider defaults include (note that they are subject to change by version):
The other optional setting not to be ignored, hibernate.default_schema
, is easily overlooked, but can have a significant impact on the querying performance. By default, table names within prepared NHibernate queries - such as those from CreateCriteria
- are not fully qualified; e.g., Customers
vs. Northwind.dbo.Customers
. The crux of the problem is that sp_execsql, the stored procedure used to execute NHibernate queries, does not efficiently optimize queries unless the table names are fully qualified. Although this is a small syntactic difference, it can slow query speeds by as much as an order of magnitude in some cases. Explicitly setting hibernate.default_schema
can provide as much as a 33% overall performance gain on data intensive pages. The following is an example of declaring these settings in web.config:
<add key="hibernate.connection.isolation" value="ReadCommitted" />
<add key="hibernate.default_schema" value="Northwind.dbo" />
The web project contains a few web pages:
The important thing to note is that the code-behind pages work with a DAO factory to talk to the database; i.e., the code isn't bound to a concrete implementation of a data access object. This makes it much easier to swap DAO implementations and unit test your code without depending on a live database. With everything in place, the following is an example of how easy it is to retrieve all the customers in the database:
IDaoFactory daoFactory = new NHibernateDaoFactory();
ICustomerDao customerDao = daoFactory.GetCustomerDao();
IList<Customer> allCustomers = customerDao.GetAll();
In the above code, a concrete reference to NHibernateDaoFactory
is retrieved via new
. In production code, as discussed in the Architectural Notes, this reference may (should?) be injected at runtime using an Inversion of Control (IoC) container such as Castle Windsor. The enterprise sample includes an example of using this utility for dependency injection.
While it's acceptable to use the new
keyword to create NHiberanteDaoFactory
within your code-behind, or controller, your domain objects should never create DAO dependencies directly. Instead, their DAO dependencies should be provided via a public setter or via a constructor. (IoC can help here as well.) As detailed previously, this greatly enhances your ability to unit test with test double DAOs. For example, the following code, found within BasicSample.Tests/Data/CustomerDaoTests.cs, retrieves a customer and gives it its DAO dependency to perform the next action:
IDaoFactory daoFactory = new NHibernateDaoFactory();
ICustomerDao customerDao = daoFactory.GetCustomerDao();
Customer customer = customerDao.GetById(Globals.TestCustomer.ID, false);
// Give the customer its DAO dependency via a public setter
customer.OrderDao = daoFactory.GetOrderDao();
Using this technique, the business layer never needs to depend directly on the data layer. Instead, it depends on interfaces defined within the same layer, as defined in the BasicSample.Core project.
What has been discussed thus far has included basic techniques for integrating NHibernate with ASP.NET and unit tests. But what has not been sufficiently demonstrated is the inclusion of these techniques into a scalable, reusable architecture. The "Enterprise" NHibernate Sample demonstrates one such example and is discussed next. As "enterprise" carries many connotations, this article uses this word to describe any real-world, database backed ASP.NET application.
To get the enterprise sample up and running, you'll need to perform the following steps in addition to those described previously in Running the Sample Applications:
Although it's best to avoid premature generalization, it's highly beneficial to begin project development with a judiciously planned architecture. A solid architectural foundation is easy to extend, establishes a clean separation of concerns, and provides built-in guidance for developers working with it. There is a fine balance between generalizing too much while still establishing a solid architecture. (I discuss this balance further in a previous post.) Although one shoe does not fit all, the enterprise sample application demonstrates, what I believe to be, a solid architectural framework for medium to large sized ASP.NET projects. The general architectural structure, including direction of concrete and interface dependencies, is shown below.
High-level structure, motivations, and assumptions of this architecture are discussed here.
The enterprise sample extends the basic sample in the following ways:
IHttpModule
has been added to the fray. Taking a close look at the example code may be daunting at first glance (and for the next couple of glances after that). But once everything's in place, it is powerful, flexible, and is minimally intrusive to the code you're developing.
If you were reading a text on an emerging technology, this section would be called "Areas for Further Research." I suppose that would be just as applicable since that's exactly what's described here. There are a few items that could be modified for better flexibility or extended for greater usability. Here are a few ideas to fill any spare time you may have:
NHibernateSessionManager
class. An example attribute would be [Transaction]
and would be placed at the top of a method. Furthermore, if working with multiple databases, the attribute would contain some sort of ID designating which database communications require a transaction, such as [Transaction("Primavera")]
. Integration with Castle Project's Automatic Transaction Management facility would be a good place to start. NHibernateSessionModule
, opens extra, unused transactions for digital assets such as images and CSS files. A discussion, and candidate solutions, may be found in the article's comments. I'm interested in hearing further suggestions for cleanly resolving this occasional problem. (Using attributes to start transactions, as described in the previous point, would also fix this.) ISession
belongs with which database. This results in the config file's location being duplicated in both web.config and in the Castle Windsor configuration file. My preference would be to get rid of this duplication, pass a simpler ID string instead, and/or eliminate needing the string to be be passed to the constructor of DAOs altogether. Please feel free to discuss your ideas for these topics in the comments below, in the NHibernate forums, or in a new CodeProject article! You can also contact me via http://devlicio.us/blogs/billy_mccafferty if you'd be interested in contributing a solution to one of these topics.
If you're migrating from 1.0x to 1.2, you'll most definitely run into a few migration issues. The official overview of the changes to the API may be found within the NHibernate 1.2 Migration Guide. Listed below are a few items that you should pay particular attention to:
<hibernate-mapping xmlns="urn:nhibernate-mapping-2.0">
with urn:nhibernate-mapping-2.2
. References may be found in HBM and config files. lazy="false"
for each class and collection that you do not want loaded lazily. After performing any migration work to NHibernate 1.2, it's good to test the following for each parent/child relationship:
The following is a quick summary of the best practices conveyed within the sample application:
hibernate.default_schema
within web.config to give NHibernate a great performance boost! I hope this article has helped with putting best practices into place for leveraging the benefits of ASP.NET, NHibernate, and unit testing. I'm currently having great success with this approach on my own projects, and look forward to hearing your experiences as well. Please let me know if you have any questions or suggestions. And if you want to see what I'm up to at any given moment, you can always follow my latest diatribes at http://devlicio.us/blogs/billy_mccafferty.
NHibernateSessionManager
to store ISession
with CallContext
instead of HttpContext
; updated article text to reflect changes as well. [Author's note: Bad idea!] DomainObject
an overhaul, added usage of custom collections, and expanded the MVP examples.