Sometimes it would be helpfully to have the possibility to define associated objects without having a declarative association defined by the AssociationAttribute, which is based on the objects key property and mapped to database foreign key constraints.
This can be realized in a simple form (without caching the already loaded collection) like the following property definition:
Public Readonly Property SelectedObjects as XPCollection
Get
myCriteria = …
Return new XPCollection(session,GetType(MyObject), myCriteria)
End Get
End Property
This allows object references, which are built on fully free search criteria, not based on foreign key relations.
The only disadvantage of such a member collection is, we cannot bind this collection at design time to form controls.
Proposed Solution:
My idea is to define a new attribute ( for example WeakAssoctiation) to define the object type of the member collection. With this attribute information XPO should be able to set the XPMemberInfo properties like IsCollection and CollectionMemberType etc. to satisfy the binding interface like normal member collections.
The above example will then look like this:
<WeakAssociation(GetType(MyObject))> _
Public Readonly Property SelectedObjects as XPCollection
Get
myCriteria = …
Return new XPCollection(session,GetType(MyObject), myCriteria)
End Get
End Property
Ticket
B331
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Thanks for the feature request. The current version does not provide a solution to your task. Most likely, we will create an attribute to specify an element type for properties of type XPCollection.