New to IdeaBlade Question

Hi Bernard

You may have other reasons for making Member and Visitors classes derive from your Contact class, but from the perspective of making the properties in the Contact class visible to these "child" classes it is not necessary to make them derive from Contact. All you need to do is define the relations between these classes in the Object Mapper. To do this, click on the "View Relations" button in the Object Mapper toolbar. This is the button immediately to the left of the ".NET language" drop down and admittedly it could be better labelled. This will bring up the "Relations" window. Click on the "Add" button to enable the Parent and Child drop down lists. In your case, you will want to specify "Contact" as the parent and "Member" as the child. Select the "PrimaryKey" property from "Contact" and FK_Contact" from "Member". This will cause a join to be defined in the rightmost list box. It is not clear to me whether the relationship between "Contact" and "Member" is 1 -1 or 1 - many, that is, whether or not there are many "Members" for each "Contact" or only one. In any case, select the correct Cardinality for this relationship. Click on the "Add" button again and repeat to define the relationship between the "Contact" and the "Visitors" classes. When you are done defining these relations, click "Save" .

Let us say that you now have an instance of a Member object that we will call "aMember". You can access the values of the Contact class by writing code such as "aMember.Contact.EmailAddress", for example, to access the EmailAddress property of the Contact object that is a parent of the aMember instance.

You define which object instances are parents of a particular child object instance by setting the values to that of the contact object. Let us say that you have a Contact instance called aContact and a Member instance called aMember. You would define aContact as the parent of aMember by simply coding "aMember.Contact = aContact"

Hope this helps.