Author: Iqbal M. Khan works for Alachisoft, a leading software company providing O/R Mapping and Clustered Object Caching solutions for .NET. You can reach him at iqbal@alachisoft.com or visit Alachisoft at http://www.alachisoft.com/rp.php?dest=/main_index.html.
If you are developing an object oriented .NET application that has to talk to a database, you'll inevitably map objects to a relational model. And, most likely you'll face situations where many-to-many relationships exist in your database. This article describes how you can handle many-to-many relationships in O/R mapping.
Most .NET applications are object oriented and at the same time they have to deal with relational databases. This creates a difficulty for the developers because they have to figure out how to map their objects to the tables in the database. Sometime, there is a one to one mapping between an object and a table and at other times, one object may consist of data from multiple tables or subset of data from one table.
The most important thing one can achieve in O/R Mapping is to capture the logical data model design in the object model of the application. This makes it really easy to design, develop, and later maintain this object model. We'll try to follow this rule when mapping many-to-many relationships to objects.
Please read the complete article at http://www.alachisoft.com/rp.php?source=/aspadvice.article.m-n/&dest=/articles/m-n_relationships.html