There are some practical reasons that one would hope some relationships among many entities can be treated as one:
businessUnit <<--->> address <<--->> person may be ideally treated as associationOwner (unit, person, ....) <-->> AddressAssociation <<--> Address By a proper implementation of AddressAssociation, address related problems can be treated in a uniform way across many entities. And the reverse problems(from address to objects have something to do with it) can be solved equally easy. Let's say AddressAssociation has the following attributes: oid, oidAddress, oidOwner, ownerEntityName, startTime, endTime, oidType, status, notes That way, the relationship's context can be recorded in a proper way (in reality, relationships are certainly not contextless). Also, an obj can now have many addresses as it actrually does, and the oidType can tell the kind of relationship (owner? rent? ...). There are many things can be better handled by hyper-relationships. Such relationships are not typical in IT practice but very common in real world. Without EOF or similar frameworks, doing things like this can be too costy, that's why WO:-). But... In EOF, the callenge of such thing is mainly about to making newAdressAssociation.setOwner(newOwner) or newAdressAssociation.addObjectToBothSidesOfRelationshipWithKey (newOwner,"owner") work. In theory, EOF's key assignment logic is good enough for such generalized case, It just not designed to look at the EOModel and realize hyper relationships, and take care of attribute pair (oidOwner,ownerEntityName). I can be wrong since I'm not doing much on most new version of WO Thanks for any ideas _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Webobjects-dev mailing list ([email protected]) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/webobjects-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
