Need a little help grasping the concepts of ORM

[Dennis Gundersen]

Hi

I'm trying to learn OO programming and I've read two books on OOP and LINQ before I started on the OA documentation, but I think I'm still missing some core understanding.

I've managed to set up a vertical hierarchy of classes where "Administrator" is an "Employee" is a "Person". However I'm still stuck in relational thinking as I can't figure out how to connect lookup tables.

The Person class has four properties; PersonID (int), FirstName, LastName, StatusID (int).

In my old non-OO solution Person.StatusID was linked in the database to table Statuses with fields StatusID (int) and Name. In the application I would then add a combo box that showed the list of Statuses.Name, but saved the value to Person.StausID.

In the OA documentation the examples creates (using my solution) a Status object in Person, rather than having StatusID as an int. And here my understanding breaks down...

Using copy and paste rather than understanding I changed my Person class to add property

 

 

 

        private Status _status;

        public Status Status
        {
            get
            {
                return _status;
            }
            set
            {
                _status = value;
            }
        }

 

First of all, when forward mapping this to the database, I get an int field named Status in my Persons table. Is that correct, being an int?

Secondly, how would I go about accessing this information?

namespace Training
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            using (IObjectScope scope = ObjectScopeProvider1.GetNewObjectScope())
            {
                scope.Transaction.Begin();
                Person p = new Person();
                p.FirstName = "Dennis";
                p.LastName = "Gundersen";
                //p.StatusID = 2; OLD VERSION
                //p.Status   WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?
                scope.Add(p);
                scope.Transaction.Commit();
            }
        }
    }
}

p.StatusID= the PK of the chosen Staus I understand, but my brain melts over p.Status = something. Should I use LINQ to SQL to lookup the values? Should Status be some sort of List instead of a class? Should I use a Struct? Aaaaargh!!!

I'm convinced that this is very easy, but I just can't grasp it to my great annoyance!

Somebody, please help!! I promise I've done a lot of searching and reading on my own already, but it's difficult to find answers when you don't know what to search for.

TIA!

Re
Dennis

[Dennis Gundersen]

The answer is

 

                p.Status = new Status();
                p.Status.StatusID = 1;

I knew it had to be easy.

 

Re
Dennis