Business component best practices

Question

I am rewriting an existing PHP application in ADF. Database is large and used in production. Current DB tables do not use many foreign keys. Should I create the custom associations manually in Business Components or create them in the database have BC creation process pick up the association automatically. What's the best practice around this?
-saidul

Answer 1

Foreign key are a vital part of the busines logic as they show how entities are wired together. I prefer to have them in the DB as all applications (adf or not) are forced to obey them. This helps to keep the data consistent.
Now if you are aleady in production, you should first check if you can apply the foreign key constrains without breaking your other running apps.
If you implement the associations in ADFbc you might hit some data which you can't save as the checks implied by ADFbc can't be met by the data.
Timo