I'm building a sales transaction. The parent is the accounting transaction table. Associated are invoice, invoice items, inventory ... The problem occurs when I put a ticket on "hold". Basically that sets the inventory aside for later fulfillment. You get to the counter and say, "oops, I also need a box of nails". Instead of voiding the whole transaction, they set your stuff aside, put the ticket on hold and recall it when you return with your nails. The invoice gets saved, but since there are no financial implications, no transaction record is created.

Of course, as I'm sitting here describing this, the question comes to my mind, "Why didn't I make the Invoice the parent table?" I'm not sure, but it may have to do with the way the dependencies are put together. Or it may have been that the more of the tables have relationships to the transaction table - which I believe makes a conceptual, but not programmatic difference.

Since I was using the child relationships merely to put them in a transaction to make sure all or none of the transactions go through, I wasn't thinking about the normal relationship between the parent and child tables.

Thanks,
Jeff