Hi Kevin,

There are two schools of thought on this one: the purists and the functionalists.

The purist approach is that tier separation should be absolute, therefore they will say that what you're saying is the right way to do things.

VFP, however, is MUCH faster dealing with cursors (data) than with an object's properties, so the functionalists (me included) will say that the business object's duties do not include actually handling the data, but just bringing the appropriate cursors on board and navigating, or deleting or creating new records. Besides, tier segregation is achieved anyway because the form doesn't have to know where the data came from. The data is placed on a particular view by the bizobj and that's all you need to know at design time.

Quoting a bit from the MereMortals framework manual, to address field values through properties in a business object falls apart in two areas: 1. You can't assing the value of a GENERAL field to a property. 2. How do you deal with multiple records (i.e. a busobject that feeds a combo box)?

If you use msde or sql server, things may change a bit: Jim Duffy's DataClass2000 (for sql server/msde based databases) does its magic the way you mentioned: fields in a table become properties of the business object. YET, when it has to deal with a group of child records related to a parent record brought up by the bizobj, he does it through cursors.


>Hello,
>
>I just starting reading Markus Egger's book on OOP and VFP and it got me thinking about my own designs. I think I am doing pretty well on OOP in UI, but I am a little weak on the Business Object side of things. Now for the question:
>
>I have data entry forms whose data fields' controlsources are directly tied to buffered VFP views that are set up in the DataEnvironment. According to proper OOP design (or n-tier type design), should these data fields be tied to business object properties and then the business object communicates with the data via getdata(), savedata() type methods? If so, doesn't the whole dataenvironment thing seem to be an impediment to separating the UI/business objects/data?
>
>Oh well, I just started chapter two, so I am sure these questions will be answered.
>
>Kevin