Beginner Question: Is the design of a read-only parent with editable child collection acceptable?

superkuton posted on Tuesday, July 07, 2009

I have a Student Object which has a child collection of ContactAddresses, ContactPersons and ContactNumbers.

In my UI in my previous (ADO.NET) app, I have a dialog form where I fetch the 3 Contact___ objects using the primary (StudentID) key of the parent object.

In the new CSLA-based app I am developing I thought of using a read-only parent (Student) that will manage the 3 Contact objects as editable child collection.

In CSLA, where the emphasis is on use cases, is this design still acceptable or there are better alternatives, or a better design option?

Thank you for helping a newbie in data access programming and in CSLA.

skagen00 replied on Tuesday, July 07, 2009

I don't think that's the right way to go... this really depends entirely on your use case but it certainly seems like you're managing a student's contact information in general...

Make your Student an editable root. Even if you don't change anything on that class (i.e. everything is read-only) your student class should manage the three collections, which should be editable child collections.

Is there a context where you actually manage student information separately?

superkuton replied on Tuesday, July 07, 2009

Thanks for the immediate response.

In my UI, I present the Student Object (editable root)
with read-only child lists of certain records:

1. Contact Addresses
2. Contact Numbers
   
3. Contact Persons
4. Training records
5. Employment records
6. etc.

When the user will edit the Training records, an editable Training Object is presented in another form.
When the user will edit the Contact Information, 1, 2 & 3 above, I present the editable child collection of the 3 contact information in another form.

So, to do the editing of contact information, i should create another Student (editable root)
which contains the child collections for the 3 contact information. Is this correct?

Thanks.