Entity Relationship Modeling - Other Business Contacts
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When we work like this, we will (most likely) see that information-wise, there is no difference between a customer and supplier: They are two things of the same kind. However; shareholder may be something different:
We see that our analysis has led us to understand that there are really no difference in the information needs whether it is customers, suppliers or club members (we run a customer club…), But we need to track each shareholder’s number of shares. The best thing to do until further, is to remove the three common entities and replace them by a type:
We can read from this that each BUSINESS CONTACT must be categorized as one and only one contact type, while CONTACT TYPE may be a category for zero or more BUSINESS CONTACTs. Contact type will here typically be customers, suppliers, club-members, or whatever business contact we have. We can se that we have built much more flexibility into the system by using super- and sub-entities in an early stage of analysis. We will return to this model after the chapter on allowed relationship types.
By the way, what about the SHAREHOLDER?
Well, the shareholder was a bit different from our other business contacts. If we want to keep the entity, we must give it all the attributes of BUSINSS CONTACT, in addition to the number of shares attribute, and keep it as an own entity. However, we will remove it totally for now, and save it for a later occasion.
Next: Attributes in entities >>
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