Hey there...Strataframe looks REALLY cool.  I am seriously considering using it on a project that i am working on, however, i have some concerns.  Most specifically, those concerns relate to complicated, ie. highly normalized, data models.

Of particular concern are the following:

1) Is the Business Object mapper designed to recognize and implement a class/BO that consists of say 2 or 3 tables sharing a primary key with a discriminator?  For example Contact --> Employee--> Manager.  In other words does it support subtyping in the DB model out of the box? (and i dont mean can it be forced to work somehow )

2) My data model is also pretty normalized.  For example, given a Contact Table(person, or organization), a ContactInfo table(phone number, postal address, or eaddress), and a ContactInfoAlias(home phone, work email, etc.) with a link table between Contact and ContactInfo that also has a foreign key reference to the ContactInfoAlias (with the intent being to assign contactinfo rows to contacts and give them a nice name) does Strataframe seem like the right tool for the job?  I have done some searching of these forums and had seen mention of something called a linkmanager (i think) - which handles many to many relationships.  Can someone explain those a little bit, how they are used and their intended purpose within the framework?

In addition to handling contact info with link tables, many other things in the data model are implemented this way, for example Party Roles, relationships between those roles, etc... it gets a little hairy.  Would this be a problem for the BO mapper?

Finally, what kind of projects would you say are not a good match for Strataframe (be honest)?

Thanks alot!

Geoff

The BusinessLayerLinkManager allows 3 business objects to be linked together, one of which is a link table (or a table of foreign keys).  You can populate one business object and the link manager will automatically load the other two (assuming you have the auto-Fill properties turned on...which by default they are).

For example, one of our users had this scenario this morning.  He had a Group table, Organization Table, and a link table named GroupOrganization.  So the Link Manager properties look somthing like this:

In this example the foreign and primary keys are defined as well..so when the GroupBO1 table is filled, it will automatically fill the Link OrganizationBO1 and GroupOrganizationBO1 tables.  This control gives you a lot of control when dealing with very normalized data structures since most times you are dealing with a foreign key of some sort.  Just so you can get a visual, below is another image showing the controls dropped on the form:

The properties show above are from the BusinessLayerLinkManager1 control in this image.

Thanks for the explanation and Fancy screenshots...i dig those "tear effects"

It seems lke the linkmanager would work great in a simple link table with 2 foreign keys..but in my case the ContactContactInfoLink actually has a reference to another table as well, the ContactInfoAlias table...is all lost?  It seems to me that this would be pretty common scenario - where not only are you creating a many to many relationship, but describing that relationship in some (normalized) way.

Not at all...just create another LinkManager class.  They can "piggy-back" each other so to speak.  When one is loaded it will create a ripple effect.  So you can basicallly go as deep as you want.

I think i understand...probably need to sleep on it..thanks guys for your quick and helpful responses.