When you drag objects from the server explorer onto the LINQ
to SQL designer, Visual Studio will inspect the primary key/foreign
key relationships of the objects, and based on them automatically create
default "relationship associations" between the different entity
classes it creates. For example, when I added both the Products and
Categories tables from Northwind onto my LINQ to SQL designer you can see that
a one to many relationship between the two is inferred (this is
denoted by the arrow in the designer):
Figure 7
The above association will cause cause the Product entity
class to have a "Category" property that developers can use to access
the Category entity for a given Product. It will also cause the Category
class to have a "Products" collection that enables developers to
retrieve all products within that Category.
Figure 8
If you don't like how the designer has modeled or named an
association, you can always override it. Just click on the association
arrow within the designer and access its properties via the property grid to
rename, delete or modify it.
