Hello,
First of all, great product. I have never used an O/R Mapper or created a Windows Forms application before, but LLBLGen has made data access and persistance a breeze (not sure I could go back to using stored procedures, except where absolutely necessary). The documentation is excellent once you get the basics down and I find most of my questions end up being .net or forms related.
Not sure if this is possible or not, so I need to post the question here.
Using v2.5, adapter, Windows Forms, .net2.0, vs2005...
Simplified Schema:
Physician Entity
'Name'
'PhysicianId' (PK)
MalPractice Insurance Carrier Entity
'Name'
'CarrierId (PK)'
Physician Insurance Entity
'PhysicianId'
'CarrierId'
'StartDate'
'Termdate'
'Amount'
'AddressId"
etc.
Address Entity
'AddressId'
'Zip'
'Street'
I have an entity collection that is bound to a datagridview. I use the grid for editing, where possible, or if complex editing is required, a context menu brings up a dialog box to edit the row. This has worked great for me so far... very easy. However, I have run into a problem where I cannot get one of the columns I need.
For instance, I have a collection of Physicians. Each physician has a M:N relation to Malpractice Insurance Carriers. I have a physician form where a datagridview is bound to the intermediate entity 'PhysicianInsurance'. If I want the Malpractice Insurance Carrier 'Name' to show up in the datagridview, I just use the 'Fields on related Fields' mapping that I created in the designer (and pull the related fields in through a static BLL function). This is not editable, but I use an edit dialog box for this (I have no problem with this, I can put a search function in the dialog and make everything very user friendly). So far so good.
However, I have one point in my schema where the related entity I want to map(fields on related fields) is not directly adjacent to my 'intermediate' entity (e.g. it is not a foreign key field). In the example above this could be the address entity. If I wanted to show the 'ZipCode' in my datagridview, how would I do that? Is it possible? The desiger doesn't seem to allow the mapping, and the datagridview doesn't allow referencing a column in a relatedentity.
I am not going to use master and detail datagridviews, so this is not an option. Does anyone have an ideas?
Thanks!