Class Design

  • Thread starter Thread starter mike morse
  • Start date Start date
M

mike morse

Could someone make a suggestion for this, and to make
things simple lets assume every order can only have one
product. (eliminating order details object)

If I have a Order, Product and ShipType object do I return
and Product object as a property of the Order object. Or
do I simply store the productID into an int property of
the order object. Same with the shiptype. I just read
this chapter in an OOP practices book where they were
storing the ID... is this correct?

-mike
 
mike said:
Could someone make a suggestion for this, and to make
things simple lets assume every order can only have one
product. (eliminating order details object)

If I have a Order, Product and ShipType object do I return
and Product object as a property of the Order object. Or
do I simply store the productID into an int property of
the order object. Same with the shiptype. I just read
this chapter in an OOP practices book where they were
storing the ID... is this correct?

-mike
Click to expand...

Well, "It depends"(tm) .. :)
If you are guaranteed that these three objects are going to live in the
same process space, then storing the ID and using that to look up more
information should be ok. Otherwise, if you are thinking of this being
either distributed or based on a web service, you might be better of
sending the object as the response. Since .NET support serialization
pretty cleanly, you would not notice that big a hit.
 
Yeah but wouldn't it be better if from the Order object
you would directly return the product object and
properties? It seems like it would be more work to have
the order object get the id and then have to create
another product object and look it up with the id.

I'm really just trying to understand if return related
objects from properties is a good practice when trying to
make a truely OO architecture.

-mike
 
Hi Mike,

I agree with you that is it more convenient to leave Product as a property
of order. And I think this is also a better OO design than including a
Product ID. Normally, we can use the design with ID in database, DataSet or
XML document. For an actual Order object, it is better to keep product as a
property. (in fact, it is a reference to a Prodcut object)

Luke
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