NHibernate queued adds on lazy-load collections

I don’t know if this behaviour is documented (well, yeah, the (N)Hibernate documentation is pretty thin but it’s improving), I wasn’t fully aware of it and this caused a bug… I’m posting this in hope it may save for someone else the time I have lost today :).

In our software we use a custom NHibernate collection type that is derived from AbstractPersistentCollection and keeps track of “back references”: that is, references to the record that owns the collection. It does this automatically when an object is added to the collection.

Now, on collections mapped as lazy-loading, Add() operations are allowed even if the collection is not initialized (i.e. the collection just acts as a proxy). When adding an object to a collection in this state, a QueueAdd() method is called that stores the added object in a secondary collection. Once a lazy initialization is performed, this secondary collection is merged into the main one (I believe it’s the DelayedAddAll() method that does this). This can be hard to debug because lazy load is transparently triggered if you just touch the collection with the debugger (providing the session is connected at that moment), and everything gets initialized properly.

Our backreference was initialized at the moment the object was really added into the main collection. But this is not enough, we had to support queued adds - that is, the cases when QueueAdd returns true. The other alternative is to disable delayed adds by commenting out the places where QueueAdd is called – I don’t know if this is possible, there seems to be some code that supports it. We decided to support delayed add, and it seems to work. The modification looks something like this (this is the PersistentXyz class):

int IList.Add(object value) 
{ 
    if (!QueueAdd(value)) 
    { 
        Write(); 
        return ((IList) bag).Add(value); 
    } 
    else 
    { 
        // if the add was queued, we must set the back reference explicitly 
        if (BackReferenceController != null) 
        { 
            BackReferenceController.SetBackReference(value); 
        } 
        return -1; 
    } 
}