What is the difference between inverse="true" and constrained="true".
Aren't both used to make the association bidirectional? Also aren't both adding a foreign key constraint linking the primary key in the 2 tables?
I am confused. Please guide me.
constrained is used for lazy loading of one-to-one relations. Because they are implemented by shared primary keys, NHibernate doesn't know if there is a record in the other table before it fetched it. With constrained you tell NHibernate that there is always a record expected, so it can create a proxy. See this blog post from Ayende Rahien.
With inverse, you tell NHibernate that a one-to-many relation is already stored by the many side, so it doesn't need to store the collection on the one side. I tried to explain it here: When to use inverse=false on NHibernate / Hibernate OneToMany relationships?
