>>In the developers guide there are several references to having multiple datatables in a single business object. Can anyone give me a real world example of when I might want to do this? Would all of the datatables be updateable? What about child business objects of that single parent business object? It all seems very confusing and so far I cannot think of a real world use for this feature.
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>The simplest example I have is a form where there are several combo boxes based on the same business object. In one application, we need to assign a claims contact person, a nursing contact person and a social work contact person. All of those people are included in the staff table but I only need a subset of that for each combo box. Thus, I create a method to create the dataset for each combo box and pass in a parameter for the type of contact and the table name. I hope that's helpful.

Thanks Linda for your attempt to help me learn something new. I am trying to get my brain around your example. If I understand correctly, conceptually you have a backend table named Staff and a related Staff business object. In the Staff business object you have a method that returns a DataSet based on the desired type of contact from the Staff backend table. So based on your example needs, you have 3 different DataSets that the same business object can manipulate by switching among the DataSets. All 3 DataSets still relate to 1 backend table.

Questions: Could multiple DataSets retrieved from the same backend table all be used to update the table? If so, how would you call the Save method etc. Your example uses only 1 backend table, but I wonder if there is a real world need for using multiple backend tables in 1 business object?

I am struggling to get the big picture of the Mere Mortals framework. Any help is appreciated.

Sam