Putting it all together: ASP.NET MVC, SQLite, NHibernate, Fluent NHibernate & Log4Net

Today, I will explain how to set up a ASP.NET MVC project, which is using NHibernate for accessing a SQLite Database and Fluent NHibernate for configuring NHibernate. In this post I will give you a general overview about the structure of the project and in my future posts I will explain more in detail single its parts.

The sample project which can be downloaded from the following link http://dl.dropbox.com/u/36200417/MvcNhibernate.zip was setup as explained below.

The project is divided in two subprojects:
a)    MVC Web application
b)    DAL (Data Access Layer)

In a real project I would have more layers and subprojects, but for this example I want to keep it simple and therefore I removed the business layer.

First I was referencing all needed dlls:
- fluentnhibernate-NH3.0-binary-1.2.0.694
- log4net
- NHibernate-3.0.0.GA-bin
- SQLite-1.0.66.0-binaries

Afterwards I was generating a Database with the following command:sqlite3 test.db.

Copying the test.db file to the App_Data folder and adding the following connection string allows Asp.Net to access the SqLite Database.

<connectionStrings>
  <add name="SqLiteCon" connectionString="data source=|DataDirectory|test.db;" />
</connectionStrings>

Let’s now investigate on the structure of the project:

Project DAL:
/DAO: Data Access Objects provide abstract interfaces to a persistence medium like a database
/DAO/Interface: Interfaces for DAOs
/DAO/Implementation: Concrete implementation that provides access to the database with NHibernate. Note: BasicNhDAO<T, EntityKey> is a base class that provides basic functions (=CRUD). For every entity a DAO object exists, that is responsible for persisting the entity.
/Entities: Plain objects for encapsulating data.
/Entities/Interface: Interfaces for the plain objects
/Entities/Implementation:
/Mapping: FluentNHibernate Mappings, which are containing information how to map entities to tables of a database.
/SessionStorage: small framework for managing the NHibernate Session.

Project MvcNhibernate:
/App_Data: contains the SqLite database file
/Controllers: MVC Controllers. SqLiteController contains the logic for this example.
/Views/SqLite: MVC Views that are interesting for this example.