I'm coming to Strataframe and .NET from Visual Foxpro and would like to set two relations for a child BO: one to the child's actual parent, and one to a lookup table for a given foreign key field on the child, something like:

OrderBO.Cust_id -> CustomerBO.Cust_id

and

OrderBO.Prod_id ->ProductBO.Prod_id

As I navigate through each Order record, I want to be able to display the related Customer.Name and Product.Title.

I've been able to successfully set the OrderBO.ParentBusinessObject = "CustomerBO" in the property sheet, but do not know how to set another relation at the same time or how to do this in code.  Any help would be much appreciated.

TIA,

Larry

Larry,

Whether the column you are trying to display is read-only or not I still believe a lookup is the answer, the only difference being that for the read-only case you need to ensure that the lookup, however it is implemented, is set so that it disallows editing/changing.

I tried using BOs based on views when I was getting started with Strataframe, and found that it just became too complex if I needed it to be updateable. That is not to say it can't be done, and in some places is preferable, but I wouldn't use one to try and maintain a table.

My experience with Devexpress is very positive, but I have no experience with alternatives. Their support is good (though not as good as Strataframe). There are a reasonable numbers of devexpress users on this forum, and has been considerable discussion in other threads, so I suggest you do a search.

Hope this helps.

Peter

I would tend to agree with Peter on the lookups.  We have hundreds of places that a foreign key value needs to be selected or set.  For example, we may have a patient and their preferred pharmacy may need to be selected.  So we may populate a combo box with only the values that need to be used and bind it to the patients foreign key field.  It is always good to create a custom Fill method that only brings back the required fields in this case...no reason to add overhead:

I would then use the FillForComboDisplay as the method to populate the combo...and the ph_pk would be the Value Member which is bound to the foreign key field.

BTW, Peter, thanks for your nice words regarding our support! 

As you may have noticed, we have a wrapper for both DevExpress and Infragistics.  Ultimately we use some of the Infragistics (after first using DevExpress) controls in our medical software.  But we have create custom controls and continue to extend our StrataFrame controls due to one isolated issue or another.  DevExpress and Infragistics are both good control companies, but we predominately use the SF controls except in areas like the UltraGrid or controls of that nature.  Infragistics also has some good masking controls (i.e. currency) but they still take some tweaking to get it just right.