Hi all, I was wondering how to represent an object which is actually a mixture of two other objects. Ideally, I was thinking to set the two parent objects as the pristine materials and the child as the mixture. However, one would track down the relative proportions on the children, referred to the parents. Unfortunately, one could do a collection of pristine materials to represent the mixture but then the collection cannot have a Parent/Child relationship to other objects, right?
Does some of you have an idea on how to tackle this problem?
PS I looked into the “cement” ELN-LIMS example but I could not find solutions to this matter.
Best
Hi,
if you really need to track the proportions and not only the materials that participate in the mixture, you could consider an intermediate “material”, whose properties are:
One mixture component: you can have objects as properties to model 1-to-1 relationships
The proportion of said component as a REAL property
You would create one object of this type for each component and add these objects as parents of the final mixture object.
This approach has the inconvenient of an additional object type, but the advantage is that these relationships are represented semantically and not just through names
The simpler alternative would be to model this type of relationship nominally by adding one proportion property and one object property for each material participating in the mixture. This is very inflexible and does not represent the relationship semantically.
For a visual representation of the first approach, see the image I attached. Notice that the arrow are similar to the notation used in UML class diagrams. The dashed arrow represents composition, the normal arrow inheritance
