Phil Bernie Consulting

I’ve been using NHibernate as the back end for a web service and ran into a little problem when returning the NHibernate objects to clients via the web service. I had a Person object which had a child collection of Addresses which I had explicitly set to lazy load depending on the request from the client. The lazy loading was fine, however when I went to serialize the Person object the serializer would check the Address property and therefore cause a lazy load of the Address collection.

I couldn’t find a way to tell NHibernate to ignore future requests on the Address collection once the Person object had been populated so in the end I had to handle it manually and return custom DTO objects via the web service.

As yet I haven’t found a better way to deal with this situation but hopefully there will be a way to remove objects from the NHibernate session or at the very least tell NHibernate to ignore specific objects in session.