On 1 Jan 2007 17:09:19 -0800,
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> Lets say I have those two classes, Person and Address. How would one
> implement the relationship between them? First, a Person can have one
> or more addresses (or none), that could be represented as a list of
> Addresses, right? But then, if I have an Address I want to see which
> persons who live there, then I would have a list of Persons in each
> Address.
> Is this doubly-linked way of doing it a good way of doing it, or is
> there a better "OO way" I haven't learned yet?
I don't know about "a better OO" way, but one way is to model the
various relationships as a list of (person, address) pairs:
persons = [ Person( ), Person( ), Person( ) ]
addresses = [ Address( ), Address( ), Address( ), Address( ) ]
livesat = ((person[ 1 ], address[ 1 ]),
(person[ 2 ], address[ 1 ]),
(person[ 2 ], address[ 2 ]))
worksat = ((person[ 1 ], address[ 3 ]),
(person[ 2 ], address[ 4 ]))
Then the list of people who live at address[ 1 ] is:
[ (person, address) for (p, a) in livesat if a is address[ 1 ] ]
But what about all the various relationships (lives at, works at, is
known to have vandalized, etc.)?
livesat = Relationship( "lives at" )
worksat = Relationship( "works at" )
vandalized = Relationship( "vandalized" )
information = ((person[ 1 ], address[ 1 ], livesat),
(person[ 2 ], address[ 1 ], livesat),
(person[ 2 ], address[ 2 ], livesat),
(person[ 1 ], address[ 3 ], worksat),
(person[ 2 ], address[ 4 ], worksat),
(person[ 1 ], address[ 4 ], vandalized))
Now the list of people who live at address[ 1 ] is:
[ (person, address) for (p, a, r) in information
if a is address[ 1 ] and r is livesat ]
(There are other ways, too, such as capturing one person and one address
right inside a Relationship; someone with a more comp-sci-theoretical
background than I have can probably tell you why or when one way might
be better than the other.)
The definitions of Person, Address, and Relationship, as well as the
user-interface(s) and the persistent storage mechanism(s), are left as
exercises to the interested reader. ;-)
Regards,
Dan
--
Dan Sommers
<http://www.tombstonezero.net/dan/>
"I wish people would die in alphabetical order." -- My wife, the genealogist
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