Fluent NHibernate mappings for localization

Question

I am trying to build a Database from NHibernate mappings and have run into a problem.

I have many classes with localized string values:

public class MyClass1 {
    public virtual int Id { get; set; }
    public virtual ShortString Name { get; set; }
    public virtual LongString Description { get; set; }
}

public class MyClass2 {
    public virtual int Id { get; set; }
    public virtual ShortString Name { get; set; }
    public virtual LongString Description { get; set; }
}

and Languages like

public class Language {
    public virtual string Code { get; set }
    public virtual string Name { get; set }
}

My ShortString and LongString classes both look the same:

public class ShortString {
    public virtual int Id { get; set; }
    public virtual IDictionary<Language, string> Values { get; set; }
}

What I want to achieve are two tables (ShortString and LongString) looking like this:

TABLE ShortString
-----------------
Id (int)
LanguageCode (nvarchar(8))
Value (nvarchar(256)) (or ntext for the LongString Table)

...with Id AND LanguageCode as primary keys and a ForeignKey to the Language Table.

And in the MyClass1 and MyClass2 tables, I want to have NameId (int) and DescriptionId (int) columns mapped to ShortString and LongString tables respectively.

I am totally stuck. How can I achieve this?

Answer 1

Maybe you could ditch short and long string altogether

public class MyClass1 {
    public virtual int Id { get; set; }
    public virtual IDictionary<Language, string> Name { get; set; }
    public virtual IDictionary<Language, string> Description { get; set; }
}

public class MyClass2 {
    public virtual int Id { get; set; }
    public virtual IDictionary<Language, string> Name { get; set; }
    public virtual IDictionary<Language, string> Description { get; set; }
}

and use the folling Mapping

public class MyClass1Map : ClassMap<MyClass1>
{
    public MyClass1Map()
    {
        [...]
        HasMany(mc => mc.Name)
            .Table("ShortString")
            .KeyColumn("id")
            .AsEntityMap("language_id")
            .Element("value")
        HasMany(mc => mc.Description)
            .Table("LongString")
            .KeyColumn("id")
            .AsEntityMap("language_id")
            .Element("value", e => e.Length(1000))
    }
}

I cant test it right now so there might be tweaking nessesary