Modeling people and organizations - Party generalization

Party generalization

When modeling people and organizations we have to make generalizations that allow us to handle both of these as one when needed.

Imagine the case when customer can be either company or person. What happens if they are totally independent in data model? Let's see the bad scenario. Take a look at Invoice class and think if you want to see something like this in your data model.

public class Person
{
	public int Id { get; set; }
	public string FirstName { get; set; }
	public string LastName { get; set; }
}

public class Company
{
	public int Id { get; set; }
	public string Name { get; set; }
}

public class Invoice
{
	public int Id { get; set; }
	
	public Person CustomerPerson { get; set; }
	public Company CustomerCompany { get; set; }
}

Let's make things worse and imagine the whole data model where there are 60 classes that are related is with Person or Company but not both of these at same time. Horror, isn't it?

Party base class

Let's introduce Party base class that generalizes Person and Company. Demo below shows how to do it using class Party. Notice the DisplayName property that brings name of party to base class. Also notice how two invoices are created and for one of them customer is Person and for other Company.

References

• Modeling people and organizations: Class Party (Gunnar Peipman)