How to implement OOP in a relational data model ?

We need to design role based access to our application application; a user may delegate part or all of his/her responsibilities to someone else.

Once responsibilities have been defined or set up for a user, we would like to be able to allow the user to delegate certain/all of their responsibilities for identified business processes to someone else. They might also want to define threshold levels or caps for certain responsibilties

For example :

A manager may have the authority to approve 5 types of requests. They may to delegate approval responsibility for 3 of these to someone else. They might further want to delegate the 4th one only if the approval amount is upto $10,000.

We would also like to be able to provide the person to whom authority has been delegated to further delegate to someone else in the same manner.

In terms of modeling this in a relational database, we want to avoid having to "copy" or "associating" each specific responsibility with a person to whom that responsibility has been delegated. Leaving the definition of the responsibility at the highest possible level of delegation, we would just like to associate an "inherit" or "extend" flag with lower levels of delegation.

I would greatly appreciate any references to URLs / books etc illustrating the different ways this behavior could be modeled in a relational database.

Thank you. Received on Sun Jul 28 2002 - 20:35:11 CEST