Introduction

Some times, especially for customers requeriments, we need a way to save the strings against the database in upper case way. One maner to do this it's letting to the business objects the job, at the getters/setters methods. But other coolest way it's let to NHibernate take care of this.

UpperString

This is the class that do the job: uNHAddIns.UserTypes.UpperString. Let's look this example:

The mapping file

As you see the property LastName it's configurated to support upper case string.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<hibernate-mapping xmlns="urn:nhibernate-mapping-2.2" assembly="NH" namespace="NH">
	
	<class name="Customer">
		<id name="Id" type="int">
			<generator class="assigned"/>
		</id>
		<property name="FirstName"  />
		<property name="LastName" type="uNHAddIns.UserTypes.UpperString, uNHAddIns"  />
	</class>

</hibernate-mapping>

The entity

namespace NH
{
    public class Customer
    {
        private int id;

        public virtual int Id
        {
            get { return id; }
            set { id = value; }
        }
        
        private string firstName;
        
        public virtual string FirstName
        {
            get { return firstName; }
            set { firstName = value; }
        }
        
        private string lastName;

        public virtual string LastName
        {
            get { return lastName; }
            set { lastName = value; }
        }    
    }
}

The run

Customer c = new Customer();					
c.Id=1;
c.FirstName = "Astor";
c.LastName = "Piazzolla";		

session.Save(c);
session.Flush();
session.Evict(c);

Customer customer = session.Get<Customer>(1);

Debug.Assert(customer.FirstName == "Astor");
Debug.Assert(customer.LastName == "PIAZZOLLA");

Before Save, the property LastName was set to Piazzolla, then we Save. After of this, we do a Get and the resultant string property was PIAZZOLLA

Cool uh ?

Advantages of this approach

• You have not touch the code.
• You can choose to which properties apply it.
• The application may use this approach for a customer, and for other do not.

Dario Quintana