Legacy Database, Fluent NHibernate, and Testing my mappings

Question

As the post title implies, I have a legacy database (not sure if that matters), I'm using Fluent NHibernate and I'm attempting to test my mappings using the Fluent NHibernate PersistenceSpecification class.

My question is really a process one, I want to test these when I build locally in Visual Studio using the built in Unit Testing framework for now. Obviously this implies (I think) that I'm going to need a database. What are some options for getting this into the build? If I use an in memory database does NHibernate or Fluent NHibernate have some some mechanism for sucking the database schema from a target database or maybe the in memory database can do this? Will I need to manually get the schema to feed to an in memory database?

Ideally I would like to get this this setup to where the other developers don't really have to think about it other than when they break the build because the tests don't pass.

Answer 1

NHibernate isn't able to re-create your database's schema and because it's a legacy system you likely won't be able to generate the schema from NH. The best approach is to do your integration tests in transactions and roll them back when complete. We run integration tests against our dev and test databases which are periodically refreshed from the live system.