Model a database foreign key in c#

Question

I am creating a calendar application. I have a Appointment table, and a Person table. The 2 are linked by PersonID field in each table.

My question is, should my underlying .Net Appointment object contain a property for the PersonName, and I populate the object from a database view (or stored procedure that joins the tables) or is it more correct to have the Appointment class contain a People class? If the answer is the latter, what is the best way of populating the Appointment/Person object from the database?

Answer 1

Supposing you're not using an ORM, you may take a look at the DAO pattern: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_access_object

I would create two DTOs:

class Person
{
    public int id { get; set; }
    public String name { get; set; }
}

class Appointment
{
    public int id { get; set; }
    public Date when { get; set; }
    public Person who { get; set; }
}

And a "full" appointment class:

class FullAppointment
{
     private Person person;
     private List<Appointment> appointment;
}

Then a DTO to get data from the DB:

class AppointmentDTO
{
   public FullAppointment retrieveFromDb(int personId)
   {//...}
}