Hi all,

I know this is gonna sound like a wierd question but i need some help, howerever this is not a direct question about the book.

In the User Data Class, when we want to get the details of a user we use a DataRow and pass that back, howver in the next chapter(news) we also have the facility (and it is used with the loadfromID() method of that module) to pass the values across. My question is when do we make that descision, as i am trying to expand on the book and i have an employers class, and now i dont know if i should return a dataRow or a custom Class????

Can anyone help me and explain?

Rob

I thought the approach you had, returning an object with parameters to represent the employer. You can do both, in the function that returns the object, pass the datarow in the new constructor (or through a function) which is used to provide the values for the parameters, then return the object to the caller. However, I have a large enough app where this became a headache, so I stuck with the ADO.NET objects.

Hope this helps,

Brian Mains

This issue is a perennial point of discussion for .net developers. If you want a fully OO solution then custom objects will give you that, at the cost of having to write much more code - although tools like CodeSmith make this task much easier. The point about DataSets, DataTables and DataRows is that they come with a lot of intrinsic functionality that in many cases is sufficient (even excessive) for many simpler applications.

There's no 'correct' answer to this - unless you have strict views on OO architecture. I've found that in most cases, like News, you need a business News class, and it usually helps if this exposes public instance properties. These can be loaded from a DataReader, or provided by parameters to the constructor. But the class can also provide static methods returning either a DataReader or a DataRow or DataSet to satisfay common requirements like filling grids or listboxes...



brian