Castle ActiveRecord and registering classes at runtime

I use the following trick for adding ActiveRecord classes after the fact for our in-house plug-in architecture.  Thanks to whichever blogger/mailing list I picked this up from so long ago.

Scenario 1: Class(es) to load inherit from same base class as current running ActiveRecord classes

 var holder = ActiveRecordMediator.GetSessionFactoryHolder();
            ActiveRecordStarter.RegisterTypes(typeof(Employee), typeof(Customer)); //register your subclasses here
            holder.RegisterSessionFactory(
                holder.GetConfiguration(typeof(ActiveRecordBase)).BuildSessionFactory(), typeof(ActiveRecordBase)
                );//reloads session factory without this types will not be registered. I believe this is actually a "feature" in Castle trunk. may be fixed now.

 This is all you need to register extra classes that are accessing the same database as the application is using.

Scenario 2:  Not only must the new types be registered but a new base class with its new configuration as well

  InPlaceConfigurationSource source = new InPlaceConfigurationSource();
            Dictionary<string, string> confdict = new Dictionary<string, string> // config. change this to suite your needs
                                                  {{"connection.driver_class", "NHibernate.Driver.SqlClientDriver"},
                                                  {"dialect"    ,"NHibernate.Dialect.MsSql2000Dialect"},
                                                  {"connection.provider","NHibernate.Connection.DriverConnectionProvider"},
                                                  {"connection.connection_string","Data Source=localhost;Initial Catalog=intranet_devel;Integrated Security=SSPI"},
                                                  {"proxyfactory.factory_class","NHibernate.ByteCode.Castle.ProxyFactoryFactory, NHibernate.ByteCode.Castle"}
                                                  };
            source.Add(typeof(BaseCRMobj), confdict);
            var holder = ActiveRecordMediator.GetSessionFactoryHolder();
            var config = new Configuration(); 
            foreach (var conf in source.GetConfiguration(typeof(BaseCRMobj)).Children) //turns ActiveRecord config Configuration could be skipped if you load Configuration object instead
            {
                config.Properties[conf.Name] = conf.Value;
            }
            holder.Register(typeof(BaseCRMobj), config); // loads the base type and its configuration into ActiveRecord
            holder.RegisterSessionFactory(holder.GetConfiguration(typeof(BaseCRMobj)).BuildSessionFactory(), typeof(BaseCRMobj)); //reloads sessionfactory again note not using ActiveRecordBase now

After you have configured the base type for your ActiveRecord classes plus its connection string then call the register types method again:

var holder = ActiveRecordMediator.GetSessionFactoryHolder();
            ActiveRecordStarter.RegisterTypes(typeof(Employee), typeof(Customer)); // register individual subclasses
            holder.RegisterSessionFactory(holder.GetConfiguration(typeof(BaseCRMobj)).BuildSessionFactory(), typeof(BaseCRMobj)); //reloads instance of SessionFactory

Overall this works quite well even if its noisy . I’m able to dynamically load connections to 5 different databases and register a hundred or so classes total, all after the application has started. The real code has some DRY cleanup going on but this is more or less what I really use.