There are situations when you do not need to get the fully tracked entities using NHibernate — you know you wouldn’t ever edit them and need minimum overhead for this specific scenario. One example is AJAX auto-completion. On the other hand, if you are as obsessed with architectural purity as me, you probably do not have Id properties in your entities, since they are artefacts of (relational) DBs.

So there is the question: in UI layer we want to do

repository.Query().Select(x => new ListItem { Key = x.Id, Name = x.Name })

But there are no “Id” properties in our entities. How can we do this (without returning to the dark ages of untyped criteria)?

There is a very simple (and working) answer. Let’s start with how I do it for individual entities. When I need a key/id in the UI to identify the entity between requests, I use repository.GetKey(entity), which internally calls session.GetIdentifier(entity). Simple and not intrusive into domain logic. Now,

repository.Query().Select(x => new ListItem { Key = GetKey(x), Name = x.Name })

is obviously impossible, since HQL/DB can not understand GetKey call.

Ok, so the solution is to pre-process the call before Linq-to-NHibernate and replace GetKey call with reference to fake property named “id”, which is a magic name NHibernate understands as identifier reference. Linq-to-NHibernate even provides public expression visitor, so it was trivial to create KeyMethodToIdRewritingVisitor (the fake PropertyInfo took most effort, which had to have some stuff to fool Expression.Property).

You can get resulting code below.
It is not perfect, but it works and flaws are really easy to polish out.

1. Repository
2. KeyMethodToIdRewritingVisitor
3. KeyEnabledQueryProvider

Is a same method you would use with NMock2, but with “DynamicProxyGenAssembly2″ in InternalsVisibleTo.
This strange name is a default dynamic assembly name used by Castle.DynamicProxy.

Do not forget that the attribute should be added to the assembly with internal types, not to the tests assembly (obvious, but I got it wrong the first time).

Update: yesthatmcgurk has pointed me to the fact that for strongly named assemblies you have to specify the public key as well. So the correct attribute for the strongly named assembly should be

[assembly:InternalsVisibleTo("DynamicProxyGenAssembly2,
PublicKey=002400000480000094000000060200000024000052534
1310004000001000100c547cac37abd99c8db225ef2f6c8a3602f3b
3606cc9891605d02baa56104f4cfc0734aa39b93bf7852f7d926665
4753cc297e7d2edfe0bac1cdcf9f717241550e0a7b191195b7667bb
4f64bcb8e2121380fd1d9d46ad2d92d2d15605093924cceaf74c486
1eff62abf69b9291ed0a340e113be11e6a7d3113e92484cf7045cc7")]
// without line-breaks