I am developing an application and I came across the following: Lets say I have an entity called Contact, that Contact belongs to a Company and the Company has a Primary Contact and a Secondary Contact and also has the remaining Contacts which I've named Normal.
My question is, what is the best approach for this when talking about entities properties and also form handling. I've though about two things:
- Having 2 fields on the Company entity called PrimaryContact and SecondaryContact and also have a one-to-many relationship to a property called contacts.
What I don't like (or I'm not 100% how to do) about this option is that on the Contact entity I would need an inversedBy field for each of the 2 one-to-one properties and also 1 for the one-to-many relationship and my personal thought is that this is kind of messy for the purpose.
- Having a property on the Contact entity called Type which would hold if it's primary, secondary or normal and in the Company methods that has to do with Contacts I would modify it and add the getPrimaryContact, getSecondaryContact, etc.
What I don't like about this option is that I would need to have 2 unmapped properties for the Company and I would need to do a lot on the form types in order to get this to work smoothly.
My question is what is the best approach for this structure and how to deal with forms and these dependencies. Let me know if this is not clear enough and I will take time and preparate an example with code and images.