Expert C# 2008 Business Objects

Chapter 9. Parent-Child Relationships

In Chapter 6, I started walking through the framework implementation. Chapter 7 covers how to declare properties, including properties that reference child objects, and Chapter 8 focuses on how object status values are tracked, including some interaction with child objects.

The idea of child objects is introduced in Chapter 3. A child object is contained by a parent object. Conversely, a parent object is an object that contains one or more child objects. The top-most parent of a group of objects is the root object, and that is the object that can be directly retrieved or updated into the database. Any child objects contained by that root object are retrieved or updated at the same time, a topic I cover in ...