An object-oriented implementation of an entity relationship model

Abstract

During systems design and implementation, high level models need to be suitably transformed to suit the lower level constructs supported by the implementation language. In cases where an entity relationship (ER) model needs to be implemented in an object-oriented environment, substantial coding is required. This is because many of the concepts in the entity relationship model are not directly supported in object-oriented languages. This tedious and error prone coding can be substantially eliminated. Much of the required codes can be consolidated into a layer of generic ER classes that directly represent the various concepts found in the entity relationship model. Specific ER models for application domains can then be directly modeled as subclasses of the generic ER classes, with minimal coding. Besides reducing coding, these classes also eliminate the transformation task otherwise required of the implementor. The design of the generic ER classes is described and discussed. © 1998 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.