Jeff's Blog

Next on the docket is a rough outline of the University Domain area. Basically it will look something like this (sometimes those class diagrams are pretty handy).

But here's another set of tough choices to make along the lines of Parentage. For instance, are the People a property of the University, or College to which they are associated? Probably not, but the only way to tell would be to get some more clarification on how this data is likely to be used by my eventual fictional application.

If this system were to back a national university ranking system, it might just be that the majority of the time when an end user is working with the University Domain object they will in fact be working with its entire set of students. Only I'm not really designing this for an oddball case like that one, which leads me to a more basic question: Why am I doing this, or more importantly where are we going with this?

Sure I'm working to make a canned Domain so I can explore new technologies, but I do have a more immediate goal in mind. When I complete this series I'm first going to put together a simple Class Registration system first in Silverlight and then in Ajax.ASP.Net to show some of the pros and cons of each. Mainly I'm going to use the more polished Dynamic Modal covered here to drive a Grid based application.

That said, when I think about the choices of developing relationships for my Domain objects, I realize that at least initially this Domain set should really be focused on the StudentStatus, StudentHistory, EmployeeStatus, EmployeeHistory and Class objects. To really flesh out this domain I need to get a full understanding of these objects. Then I'll double back on my University hierarchy and person hierarchy.

So here's my initial pass at the first object in that chain Student Status.

All I'm shooting for here is to capture, what person, what classes, and what what's the state of the schedule. This data will be augmented by History records and by a StudentRecord that will act as the link between the College and the student.

As a general note I'm planning to switch to these class diagrams, they're a lot more meaningful that the ugly code snippets I've been using and at least for the next new posts nothing interesting is going into the code anyway.