PluralizingNamingStrategy for NHibenrate
time to read 2 min | 293 words

One of the nicest parts of developing with NHibernate is that you can get NHibernate to generate the table from the mapping. This is extremely useful during development, when changes to the domain model and the data model are fairly common. This is even more important when you want to try something on a different database. (For instnace, you may want to use a SQLite database during testing / development, and SQL Server for production, etc). I intend to post soon about unit testing applications that uses NHibernate, and this functionality is a extremely important in those cases.

This functionality has just one issue, unless you explicitly specify the table name, it uses the name of the class as the name of the table, this tends to give me ticks. Mostly because I am used to thinking about tables in plurals. A table named Employee is an anatema, a table named Employees is all right.

Take a look at this simple model:

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Creating the mapping for it is not hard, just tedious at times. Creating the mapping and then creating the tables is just boring, and the default NHibernate naming rules are not acceptable for me. I decided to take a leaf from Ruby On Rail (actually, I robbed the MonoRail generator for the source code, and converted it from Boo to Ruby) and create an Inflector and a pluralizing naming strategy. Now, when I generate the table structure from the mapping, I get the following database structure:

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Now this is much nicer.

 

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