I was reading this stack overflow question: How can I solve this: Nhibernate Querying in an n-tier architecture?

The author is trying to abstract away NHibernate and is being counseled rather heavily not to do so. In the comments there are a couple of blog entries by Ayende on this topic:

The false myth of encapsulating data access in the DAL

Architecting in the pit of doom the evils of the repository abstraction layer

Ayende is pretty down on abstracting away NHIbernate. The answers on StackOverflow push the questioner toward just standing up an in-memory Sqlite instance and executing the tests against that.

The Sqlite solution is pretty painful with complex databases. It requires that you set up an enormous amount of data that isn’t really germane to your test in order to satisfy FK and other constraints. The ceremony of creating this extra data clutters the test and obscures the intent. To test a query for employees who are managers, I’d have to create Departments and Job Titles and Salary Types etc., etc., etc.. Dis-like.

What problem am I trying to solve?

In the .NET space developers tend to want to use LINQ to access, filter, and project data. NHibernate (partially) supports LINQ via an extension method off of ISession. Because ISession.Query<T> is an extension method, it is not stubbable with free mocking tools such as RhinoMocks, Moq, or my favorite: NSubstitute. This is why people push you to use the Sqlite solution—because the piece of the underlying interface that you want to use most of the time is not built for stubbing.

I think that a fundamental problem with NHibernate is that it is trying to serve 2 masters. On the one hand it wants to be a faithful port of Hibernate. On the other, it wants to be a good citizen for .NET. Since .NET has LINQ and Java doesn’t, the support for LINQ is shoddy and doesn’t really fit in well the rest of the API design. LINQ support is an “add-on” to the Java api, and not a first-class citizen. I think this is why it was implemented as an extension method instead of as part of the ISession interface.

I firmly disagree with Ayende on Generic Repository. However, I do agree with some of the criticisms he offers against specific implementations. I think his arguments are a little bit of straw man, however. It is possible to do Generic Repository well.

I prefer to keep my IRepository interface simple:

    public interface IRepository : IDisposable
    {
        IQueryable<T> Find<T>() where T: class;

        T Get<T>(object key) where T : class;

        void Save<T>(T value) where T: class;

        void Delete<T>(T value) where T: class;

        ITransaction BeginTransaction();

        IDbConnection GetUnderlyingConnection();
    }

Here are some of my guidelines when using a Generic Repository abstraction:

• My purpose in using Generic Repository is not to “hide” the ORM, but
  • to ease testability.
  • to provide a common interface for accessing multiple types of databases (e.g., I have implemented IRepository against relational and non-relational databases) Most of my storage operations follow the Retrieve-Modify-Persist pattern, so Find<T>, Get<T>, and Save<T> support almost everything I need.
• I don’t expose my data models outside of self-contained operations, so Attach/Detach are not useful to me.
• If I need any of the other advanced ORM features, I’ll use the ORM directly and write an appropriate integration test for that functionality.
  • I don’t use Attach/Detach, bulk operations, Flush, Futures, or any other advanced features of the ORM in my IRepository interface. I prefer an interface that is clean, simple, and useful in 95% of my scenarios.
• I implemented Find<T> as an IQueryable<T>. This makes it easy to use the Specification pattern to perform arbitrary queries. I wrote a specification package that targets LINQ for this purpose.
  • In production code it is usually easy enough to append where-clauses to the exposed IQueryable<T>
  • For dynamic user-driven queries I will write a class that will convert a flat request contract into the where-clause needed by the operation.
• I expose the underlying connection so that if someone needs to execute a sproc or raw sql there is a convenient way of doing that.