Best Way To Model Many-To-One Relationships In NHibernate When Dealing With A Legacy DB?

Warning - I am very new to NHibernate. I know this question seems simple - and I'm sure there's a simple answer, but I've been spinning my wheels for some time on this one. I am dealing with a legacy db which really can't be altered structurally. I have a details table which lists payment plans that have been accepted by a customer. Each payment plan has an ID which links back to a reference table to get the plan's terms, conditions, etc. In my object model, I have an AcceptedPlan class, and a Plan class. Originally, I used a many-to-one relationship from the detail table back to the ref table to model this relationship in NHibernate. I also created a one-to-many relationship going in the opposite direction from the Plan class over to the AcceptedPlan class. This was fine while I was simply reading data. I could go to my Plan object, which was a property of my AcceptedPlan class to read the plan's details. My problem arose when I had to start inserting new rows to the details table. From my reading, it seems the only way to create a new child object is to add it to the parent object and then save the session. But I don't want to have to create a new parent Plan object every time I want to create a new detail record. This seems like unnecessary overhead. Does anyone know if I am going about this in the wrong way?

I'd steer away from having child object containing their logical parent, it can get very messy and very recursive pretty quickly when you do that. I'd take a look at how you're intending to use the domain model before you do that sort of thing. You can easily still have the ID references in the tables and just leave them unmapped.

Here are two example mappings that might nudge you in the right direction, I've had to adlib table names etc but it could possibly help. I'd probably also suggest mapping the StatusId to an enumeration.

Pay attention to the way the bag effectivly maps the details table into a collection.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<hibernate-mapping default-cascade="save-update" xmlns="urn:nhibernate-mapping-2.2">
    <class lazy="false" name="Namespace.Customer, Namespace" table="Customer">
        <id name="Id" type="Int32" unsaved-value="0">
            <column name="CustomerAccountId" length="4" sql-type="int" not-null="true" unique="true" index="CustomerPK"/>
            <generator class="native" />
        </id>

        <bag name="AcceptedOffers" inverse="false" lazy="false" cascade="all-delete-orphan" table="details">
          <key column="CustomerAccountId" foreign-key="AcceptedOfferFK"/>
          <many-to-many
            class="Namespace.AcceptedOffer, Namespace"
            column="AcceptedOfferFK"
            foreign-key="AcceptedOfferID"
            lazy="false"
           />
        </bag>

  </class>
</hibernate-mapping>


<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<hibernate-mapping default-cascade="save-update" xmlns="urn:nhibernate-mapping-2.2">
    <class lazy="false" name="Namespace.AcceptedOffer, Namespace" table="AcceptedOffer">
        <id name="Id" type="Int32" unsaved-value="0">
            <column name="AcceptedOfferId" length="4" sql-type="int" not-null="true" unique="true" index="AcceptedOfferPK"/>
            <generator class="native" />
        </id>

        <many-to-one 
          name="Plan"
          class="Namespace.Plan, Namespace"
          lazy="false"
          cascade="save-update"
        >
        <column name="PlanFK" length="4" sql-type="int" not-null="false"/>
        </many-to-one>

        <property name="StatusId" type="Int32">
            <column name="StatusId" length="4" sql-type="int" not-null="true"/>
        </property>

  </class>
</hibernate-mapping>