Basic design questions

Crestline posted on Friday, October 13, 2006

First off I want to thank everyone for all the advice offered.  This forum is great!

I have a basic application design type question I have been going back and forth on for quite sometime.  We are creating a schedule application where the main form consists of a grid containing production items and a  gantt chart containing  the scheduled departments for these production items.   With in these departments there are workcentre items.  In the past, the old version, we would load everything (very slow) and manipulate everything in memory and on user demand (File|Save or on application close) everything would be saved out to the database.  Now that we are rewriting it, I'd like to get some advice on what might be a better approach.

In general, would you get rid of the 'global save' and have all edits update the database immediately?  I can see then how we need to build specific objects for each function (in this case, the edit/add forms).  In doing so, I'm a little concerned on how the main form would get updated when the editing forms save and close.  Like what would the procedure be to reload a given object and not the entire collection?

The current structure mapped out at the moment is basically like our old version but I can't help but think that this is just wrong.  One great big object and its children, grand children that get passed between forms, etc...

I'm very new to OO programming, love it, but get a little disoriented and find myself going back to data centric design.  Any insight, links, literature recommendations, etc. would be grateful.