Add to a collection without retrieving the whole collection????

[Suggy75]

Here is the scenario

I have a Customer object and a Note object. My Customer has collection
of Notes, along with a method to add a new note to a customer.

..and here is the mapping on my Customer object. As you can see I have
a link table (Oracle database BTW)

<bag name="Notes" table="CUSTOMER_NOTES_MAPPING" lazy="true" batch-
size="20" cascade="save-update">
<key column="ACCOUNT_NUMBER"></key>
<many-to-many class="Note" column="NOTE_ID"></many-to-many>
</bag>

So when I save my Customer object with a new Note added, NHibernate
generates 2 insert statements, 1 for the notes table and one for the
link table. All pretty standard stuff.


Now onto the challenge I face.

I run some batch processing against my Customer objects (actually a
'CustomerBatch' object with specific mappings for batch processing).

At certain points during the processing, I add notes to the customer
so the front end users can see what the batch process has done. In
this scenario, I don't need / want to retrieve the Notes collection,
all I want to do is add to it. Obviously, as soon as my AddNote(...)
method references the Notes property to add a new item, the entire
collection is loaded from the database.

As my notes table is growing, the performance of my batch process is
slowing as it's retrieving large numbers of objects it doesn't need.

Now the question.

Is it possible to map a 'write only collection' for want of a better
phrase? So when I add a note to my customer, it never retrieves the
saved collection, only adds to it?

I've thought about directly persisting the Note object and somehow at
the same time insert into the link table also, but I can't help
thinking there could be a simple mapping which would overcome by
initial challenge.

[Fabio Maulo]

lazy="extra"

[emp...@gmail.com]

If i recall correctly from nhibernate documentation,
when you add an item to a bag, it won't load (regardless if it is
lazy="extra" or not). However if it is a SET then it must ensure the
uniquness so it will load the collection.
From this perspective Bag's are more efficient than sets.

On Jun 9, 9:27 pm, Fabio Maulo <fabioma...@gmail.com> wrote:
> lazy="extra"

[H.Alex]

inverse="true"

[Suggy75]

Almost works but I don't get an insert into my link table.