I would not recommend that you use the NHibernate "bag" mapping option for a many-to-many association, for example:
Never mind the strange domain, it is for a upcoming NHibernate presentation and I was too bored with the normal Order > OrderLines example domains.
The reason why using a bag for many-to-many is not recommended is because of the poor update behavior you get. If you were to load an entity (RebelEncounter in this case) that has a ShipsLost many-to-many association and just add another StarDestroyer to the ShipsLost collection like this:
This would be issued to the database:
As you can see all the existing ships where deleted and then reinserted (along with the single new one you added). You can probably guess that this is far from ideal from a performance stand point. However it is easy to fix. First we have to change the mapping from bag to set:
NHibernate will use the HashedSet type from the Iese.Collection framework as the collection type when using the set mapping, that means that the type for the property can no longer be IList<StarDestroyer> since HashedSet does not implement that interface, however it does implement ICollection<T>. So we can change the code to something like this:
With this change NHibernate will now only insert the newly added entity:
