[Design] Class or DataTable

Discordia · Apr 28, 2012

This posting is about design issues. I am a VB6 developer and i am new to .net. I wanted to ask something about design issues when we develop software under .net platform. 1) Let say, i have this scenario, i am creating an application for a bookstore. So, i will have "Publications" collection, which contains "Publication" objects. For each "Publication" object, it will have a property returning "Books" collection (and some other publication propertise), which contains "Book" objects. So the model will be something like this: +BookStore +--Publications (collection) +----Publication (object) +------Books (collection) +--------Book (object) Is this the way we should design our application? Is this what we call OOP? Because in our mind, we will probably come out with the following design (with VB6 component in our mind): 2) We have a "BookStore" component, which have a function call "Publications". This function will return us a datatable (or recordset) will all the publications and it related fields. And we will have another function, call "Books" that take a parameter for the publication id, and it will return us a datatable (or recordset) with all the books and related fields. - Which is the proper way of designing the application? I know that the design issues is very subjective, and to learn that we can refer to tones of books. But what i hope to know is that, usually and practically, which is the proper way of doing this, as we know, sometime what we read from a book might not be practical. - Let say, whether we should create the "Publication" (as well as the "Book") as a class with all the publication propertise (like PublicationNameProperty, PublicationCountryProperty...), or we just create a function to retrun a datatable with all the columns for related details (like PublicationNameColumn, PublicationCountryColumn...)? - I guess if we return a datatable from a function, it will required some overhead to generate the datatable. But i am not sure whether that is the case? - If we return a datatable from a function, we will be able to bind it to a data control directly (eg. DataGrid, DataList). But can we like bind a "Publications" collection to the data control directly? or we have to loop through each "Publication" object in the collection to add the object property one by one? We can to this: MyDataGrid.DataSource = objBookStore.Publications(); (Let say, objBookStore.Publications() will return a datatable) But can we do this? MyDataGrid.DataSource = objBookStore.Publications; (Let say, Publications is a property (collection). It has Publication objects (objBookStore.Publications[0] is the first Publication object in the collection, and so on...)) I'm hopeless at design and architecture so I won't insult you by offering an opinion other than to say, have a dig around in hte MSDN Architecture center... that's where I go when I'm feeling "high-brow" ;-) http://msdn.microsoft.com/architecture/

[Design] Class or DataTable

Discordia

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