How to model a Many to many-relationship in code?

Question

Suppose I have 2 tables in a database. eg: Dog & Boss This is a many to many relationship, cause a boss can have more than 1 dog, and a dog can have more than 1 owner. I

Answer 1

In a relational model, the best way to model a many to many relationship (using your example of Dogs/Bosses) is to have three separate tables.

One table for DOGS, one table for BOSSES (and each of these tables has a unique key), and the third table is usually a "junction table".

This table will usually have at least two fields, one field for the foreign key for a Dog and the other field for the foreign key of a Boss. This way each Dog can have many bosses, and each Boss can have many Dogs.

Now, when it come to modeling this in code in a more object-oriented manner, this is usually achieved by having a Dog class and a Boss class. As well as having the usual atomic properties for each of these objects, each one would also expose a property that is a collection of the other.

So, for example, a Dog object would have a property called "Bosses". This property would expose a collection of Boss objects that are allocated to the specific Dog object (as defined in the junction table), and on the other side, each Boss object would expose a property called Dogs which would be a collection of Dog objects allocated to that specific Boss object (as defined by the junction table).

Note that there may well be some "overlap" in these objects (i.e. one "dog" object may have "boss" objects that another "dog" object has), however, this is the traditional mechanism for translating a three-table many-to-many relational model into an object oriented one.