Castle ActiveRecord Documentation

The Castle ActiveRecord project is an implementation of the ActiveRecord pattern for .NET. The ActiveRecord pattern consists on instance properties representing a record in the database, instance methods acting on that specific record and static methods acting on all records.

Castle ActiveRecord is built on top of NHibernate, but its attribute-based mapping frees the developer of writing XML for database-to-object mapping, which is needed when using NHibernate directly.

:warning: Warning: Although ActiveRecord makes using NHibernate easy it does not hide all details of NHibernate behaviour. You need to understand NHibernate flushing behaviour and how to work with text/ntext columns.

Reference Manual

• Understanding Scopes - Explains the SessionScope and TransactionScope classes
• Validators
• XML Configuration Reference

User's Guide

• Getting Started - A tutorial for "how", after the introduction explains "what"
• Configuration and Initialization - Explains the configuration options and schema, and provides some illustrative examples as well
• Creating an ActiveRecord class
• The Persistency Lifecycle
• Primary Key Mapping
• Simple Column Mapping
• Relations Mapping
  • BelongsTo
  • HasMany
  • HasAndBelongsToMany
  • OneToOne
  • Any and HasManyToAny
• Schema Generation
• Unit Testing
• Type Hierarchy - Discuss approaches to achieve inheritance within your object model and map it correctly to the underlying database
• Nested Data (NHibernate Components)
• Using HQL (Hibernate Query Language) - Illustrates the usage of HQL
• Native SQL Queries
• Using Scopes
• Enabling Lazy Load
• Validation Support - Presents the ActiveRecordValidationBase that is able to validate properties with predefined validators
• Best Practices - Some recommendations
• Web Applications
• Troubleshooting - Something went wrong? Check what problems we had and how we work around them
• Frequently Asked Questions
• External Articles on ActiveRecord

Advanced Usage

• Using the ActiveRecordMediator (avoiding a base class)
• Using Version and Timestamp
• Using Imports
• Hooks and Lifecycle
• Framework Events
• Accessing more than one database
• Tuning (Performance Improvements)
• ByteCode Generator and Scopeless Lazy Loading

Integrations

• MonoRail ActiveRecord Integration
• MonoRail ActiveRecord Scaffolding