Auto Quote Table/Column names

Since long time we have a very interesting request on NHibernate JIRA (NH-188).

If you are working in a multi-RDBMS application, you are annoyed, for sure, quoting a table-name or a column-name. As a very good persistent-layer this should be a NHibernate’s work.

I’m happy to announce that the problem is solved (even if, so far, is not done by default).

If you want that NH take the responsibility of properly quote table-name or column-name only where really needed now you can do it in two ways:

1. Trough configuration
2. Explicitly by code

Trough configuration

As you probably know NHibernate’s configuration has some property oriented to mapping-to-DLL tasks.

For schema integration you can use

<property name="hbm2ddl.auto">create-drop</property>

Allowed values for hbm2dll are:

• update : auto execute SchemaUpdate on BuildSessionFactory
• create : auto execute SchemaExport on BuildSessionFactory
• create-drop : auto execute SchemaExport on BuildSessionFactory recreating the schema
• validate : auto execute SchemaValidator on BuildSessionFactory

The new property is:

<property name="hbm2ddl.keywords">auto-quote</property>

Allowed values are:

• none : disable any operation regarding RDBMS KeyWords
• keywords : (activated by Default)imports all RDBMS KeyWords where the NH-Dialect can provide the implementation of IDataBaseSchema (so far available for MsSQL, Oracle, Firebird, MsSqlCe, MySQL, SQLite, SybaseAnywhere)
• auto-quote : imports all RDBMS KeyWords and auto-quote all table-names/column-names on BuildSessionFactory

Explicitly by code

When you have an instance of a configured configuration (just before call BuildSessionFactory) you can execute:

SchemaMetadataUpdater.QuoteTableAndColumns(configuration);

That’s all.

The advantage

Take a look to this mapping:

<class name="Order">
   <id type="int">
       <generator class="native"/>
   </id>
   <property name="Select"/>
   <property name="From"/>
   <property name="And"/>
   <property name="Column"/>
   <property name="Name"/>
</class>

Well… now it is working fine without explicitly quote.

Enjoy NHibernate’s multi-RDBMS easy support.