A question about entities, roles and interfaces in Entity Framework 4.
- by mvole
Hi,
I am an experienced .NET developer but new to EF - so please bear with me. I will use an example of a college application to illustrate my problem. I have these user roles:
Lecturer, Student, Administrator.
In my code I envisage working with these entities as distinct classes so e.g. a Lecturer teaches a collection of Students. And work with 'is Student' 'TypeOf' etc.
Each of these entities share lots of common properties/methods e.g. they can all log onto the system and do stuff related to their role.
In EF designer I can create a base entity Person (or User...) and have Lecturer, Student and Administrator all inherit from that.
The difficulty I have is that a Lecturer can be an Administrator - and in fact on occasion a Student can be a Lecturer.
If I were to add other entities such as Employee and Warden then this gets even more of an issue.
I could presumably work with Interfaces so a person could implement ILecturer and IStudent, however I do not see how this fits within EF.
I would like to work within the EF designer if possible and I'm working model-first (coding in C#).
So any help and advice/samples would be very welcome and much appreciated.
Thanks
