Is there a way to persist an enum to the DB using NHibernate? That is have a table of both the code and the name of each value in the enum.
I want to keep the enum without an entity, but still have a foreign key (the int representation of the enum) from all other referencing entities to the enum's table.
Why are you guys over complicating this? It is really simple.
The mapping looks like this:
<property name="OrganizationType"></property>
The model property looks like this:
public virtual OrganizationTypes OrganizationType { get; set; }
The Enum looks like this:
public enum OrganizationTypes
{
NonProfit = 1,
ForProfit = 2
}
NHibernate will automatically figure it all out. Why type more than you need????
You can use the enum type directly: http://web.archive.org/web/20100225131716/http://graysmatter.codivation.com/post/Justice-Grays-NHibernate-War-Stories-Dont-Use-Int-If-You-Mean-Enum.aspx. If your underlying type is a string, it should use the string representation, if it is numeric, it will just use the numeric representation.
But your question wording sounds like you're looking for something different, not quite an enum. It seems that you want a lookup table without creating a separate entity class. I don't think this can be done without creating a separate entity class though.
An easy but not so beautiful solution:
Create an integer field with and set the mapping in the mapping file to the field. Create a public property that uses the integer field.
private int myField;
public virtual MyEnum MyProperty
{
get { return (MyEnum)myField; }
set { myField = value; }
}