Deciding whether an NHibernate object reference is a proxy

Have you ever had a need to decide whether an object reference to an NHibernate-mapped object is the real instantiated object or an NHibernate-generated proxy used for lazy loading? Here’s how to do it:

if (entityObject is NHibernate.Proxy.INHibernateProxy)
{
  ...
}

You don’t often need to make a distinction between proxies and the real objects but it may be useful when traversing object structures without triggering lazy-loading.

A related method is NHibernateUtil.IsInitialized which may come in handy in similar use cases as the above. It tells whether a proxy or persistent collection is initialized (i.e. loaded from the database) or not.

if (NHibernateUtil.IsInitialized(entityObject))
{
  ...
}

/Emil