Hi, I've been going thru my app now that I know the magic of VO's and converting most things to value objects- loading my VO's into datagrids, forms, all is great.
I do have 1 question though, let's say I have a 'employee' value object that has the property 'departmentID'. Is it common practice to also include the 'departmentName' in the value object? I already have a collection of departments (departmentID,departmentName) value objects, I want to be able to at any point find the corresponding department record so I can display the name. Keeping it in the VO seems like a hack though, sounds like it would leave the application open to display sync issues (name in department vo is updated but the customer vo is not). I know I can write a renderer for the datagrids to show the related values from other collections, but there are other display situations too and I don't want this getting out of hand. So I guess the question is, what's the best way to handle foreign key values when dealing with VO's? Include the related values in the VO, or look them up each time? thanks, d.
