AssociationAttribute

This article is relevant to entity models that utilize the deprecated Visual Studio integration of Telerik Data Access. The current documentation of the Data Access framework is available here.

Two of the relationships exposed by Telerik Data Access metadata are a foreign key relationship and a relationship that is exposed via a join table in the database. Telerik Data Access includes two types of attributes used to describe these relationships - ForeignKeyAssociationAttribute and JoinTableAssociationAttribute. Both of the attributes are covered in this chapter.

Relationships in relational database are typically modeled as foreign key values that refer to primary keys in other tables. To navigate between them you explicitly associate the two tables by using a relational join operation. On the other hand, persistent classes used by Telerik.OpenAccess.ORM, refer to each other by using property references or collections of references that you navigate by using "." (dot) notation.

The AssociationAttribute is a base class for the ForeignKeyAssociation and JoinTableAssociation attributes.

The following list describes the properties of the AssociationAttribute.

• Depend - specifies whether the associated object should be deleted together with its parent object. The default value is False.
• IsUnique - indicates a unique constraint on the foreign key. The default value is False.