setfirstresult & setmaxresult in child collection

I have and entity lets call it Entity, and a Child collection Children. I have a screen where the user has the Entity information, and a list with the Children collection, but that collection can be get very big, so i was thinking about using paging: get the first 20 elements, and lazy load the next only if the user explicitly presses the next button.

So i created in the Entity Repository a function with this signature:

IEnumerable<Child> GetChildren(Entity entity, int actualPage, int numberOfRecordsPerPage)

I need to use the setfirstresult and setmaxresult, not in the Agregate root Entity, but in the child collection. But when i use those two configurations, they allways refer to the entity type of the HQL/Criteria query.

Other alternative would be to create a HQL/Criteria query for the Child type, set the max and first result, then filter the ones who are in the Entity Children collection (by using subquery). But i wasn't able to do this开发者_运维问答 filter. If it was a bidirectional association (Child refering the parent Entity) it would be easier.

Any suggestions?

Any

One approach would be to create a query that returns results from both tables by doing a group by. This approach would allow you to apply paging on data that will come from the children collection and have a common factor (the entity's ID in each row) while you keep your starting point (the Entity object). What I mean is something like that:

public IList<object> GetData(int entityID, int actualPage, int numberOfRecordsPerPage)
        {
            ICriteria criteria = _repository.Session.CreateCriteria<FlowWhatIfProfile>("entity")
                .CreateCriteria("Children", "children", NHibernate.SqlCommand.JoinType.InnerJoin)
                .Add(Restrictions.Eq("children.EntityID", entityID));           

            ProjectionList pl = Projections.ProjectionList();
            pl.Add(Projections.GroupProperty("children.Id"));
            pl.Add(Projections.GroupProperty("children.Property1"));
            pl.Add(Projections.GroupProperty("children.Property2"));
            pl.Add(Projections.GroupProperty("children.Property2"));
            pl.Add(Projections.GroupProperty("entity.Id"));

            return criteria.SetProjection(pl)
                .SetFirstResult(actualPage * numberOfRecordsPerPage)
                .SetFetchSize(numberOfRecordsPerPage)
                .List<object>();
        }

The drawback would be that your returned data are a list of arrays (you will have to cast object to object[]) but you can overcome that by using the AliasToBean functionality that lest NHibernate project these arrays to strongly typed objects that you define.

it's simple with CreateFilter

session.CreateFilter(entity.children, "")
    .SetFirstResult(0)
    .SetMaxResults(20)
    .List();

http://knol.google.com/k/fabio-maulo/nhibernate-chapter-16/1nr4enxv3dpeq/19#