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Relationship properties
Feb. 1st, 2007 06:45 pmMy brain is drawing a blank on this:
Let's say I have a class Group and a class Person, where there's an n:m relationship between these. It's simple to say that Group could have an attribute "members" which is a collection of Persons, or Person could have an attribute "groups" which is a collection of Groups.
The problem then is that there's no relationship properties there. I can't easily describe for how long the person has been a member of the group, when that membership expires, etc. It seems to me that these type of properties ought to be describable in an elegant way. Perhaps as a characteristic of the array? I want to do this ideally in a way that for items that have no meaningful characteristics I can just use a standard Array class of some sort, but that when properties come up, I want to be able to add them silently so that existing code can continue to just work.
Let's say I have a class Group and a class Person, where there's an n:m relationship between these. It's simple to say that Group could have an attribute "members" which is a collection of Persons, or Person could have an attribute "groups" which is a collection of Groups.
The problem then is that there's no relationship properties there. I can't easily describe for how long the person has been a member of the group, when that membership expires, etc. It seems to me that these type of properties ought to be describable in an elegant way. Perhaps as a characteristic of the array? I want to do this ideally in a way that for items that have no meaningful characteristics I can just use a standard Array class of some sort, but that when properties come up, I want to be able to add them silently so that existing code can continue to just work.
