The BOs are defined.  Relations exist.  The user wants a form that simply displays data from the BOs.  For example:

Work Order BO
workorderindex (pk)
workorderid
partindex (fk)

Parts BO
partindex (pk)
partnum
unitindex (fk)

Units BO
unitindex (pk)
unitdesc

The grid will display workorderid, partnum, unitdesc.  With only the BOs, their corresponding BBSs and a DevEx Grid, can this be done?  If so, how?

I can easily get the Work Order BO and the Parts BO to display everything I need (employing the appropriate repository controls in the grid).  The Units BO is the kicker.

Hoping someone in the SF community will have run into this issue and will be able to shine some light on this.  Please note that I do not want to resort to SQL script here.  I can certainly create a data query and pass the results to the grid and bypass the BOs altogether.  That is not what I want to do.  I have some custom properties that are showing up in the grid from the Work Order BO that I must have.  These will be lost if I bypass the BOs.

Thanks,
Bill

Dustin,

Much appreciated response!  I do not want to "complicate" things by adding custom properties to the first BO which reflect the already existing properties of the second and third BO.  I think that I may be trying to do something with business objects that they were not intended to do.  In other words, I cannot "query" (derive a table from) the business objects...I need to go back to the source DB for that.

Bill

Bill,



OK, so the BBS needs to have a strong typed property to work...didn't know that.



However, you might want to consider a ListView instead, since the data is readonly. In this case, you don't need strong typed properties, just columns in the underlying data table (they must be aliased in SQL though). You might have set up the population setting via code, but it works...I'm using heavily in a custom search form I use. In my case, I'm allowing the user to search on not just the base table, but also on values in a parent table and/or other FK tables. E.g. in your case, this would allow the user to search on unit description to retrieve a work order. I build the list view based on columns in the data table. You just need to alias all the columns in SQL. I don't think you can set this up via the designer, as it will only show you the strongly typed properties.



Of course, if you need to pump out reports, then you may be back to a grid....which means either adding the custom properties to the appropriate BO or creating a special BO based on a view. You may find that the custom properties are the way to go, as they might have other uses. If you use them, you'd just need to add these columns to your fill methods, then access the extra columns in you properties. There are lots of good posts on this out there.



Hope that helps!