Question

Parent - Child

1

Situation: Two entities, Parent and Child. One Parent can have multiple Child records. Now, when taking a look on the association tabpage of the Parent properties, the labels of Parent and Child are switched. Parent = Child and Child = Parent. This isn't right, or is it?

asked 2015-05-08

Thijs Schoemaker

1 answers

Sebastiaan van den Broek · Answer 1 · 2015-05-08

It is (or can be at least), the side where you start drawing from and where the association is stored is the parent, but this parent is the * side which points at the 1 side. This makes it so the association field only has to contain 1 identifier in most cases, which is quite useful in foreign-key constructions (even though it doesn't work like that in the database currently).

It doesn't necessarily say anything about the logical relationship between the entities, especially not in this case where a (logical) parent can have multiple (logical) children.