David,


>> Why do you want to avoid reflection? For most applications the penalty will not be too great.

I haven't really done tests to check the performance penalty of late binding. I only followed what is said in litterature (among others Kevin's book ".NET for Visual FoxPro Developers" in chapter 5).

>> Also, have you considered copying the objects directly?

I didn't consider copying directly because I need much more functionnality than simply copying the business object. When the user want's to copy, let's say an offer business object (because he wants to make a new offer that resembles an old one and change it a little bit), not only the actual offer business object has to be copied, the offeritems (child BO) have to be copied as well. Also new primary keys have to be generated for the offer as well for all the offeritems and all the new offeritems have to refer to the newly created offer which implies that the replication process has to respect a certain order (the new primary key for the new offer BO has to be generated before the creation of the child so the new offeritems can refer to it and no internal consistency error would occur in the SQL database.

NB: I originally thought this replication process had to take place in the database and I wrote Transact-SQL stored procedures with no scroll cursors and indirectly calling other stored procedures: execute (@lcCommand) to do this. I managed to do this but it appeared to be very complex and difficult to debug. Since I also wanted to be able to switch to an other database server (I use Sybase SQL anywhere but want to be able to switch to MySQL) I decided to do it in a .Net Business tier using MM.Net.


Mark