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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-23T22:50:01+00:00

I have a standard many-to-many relationship in my database between Person and Widget. A

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I have a standard many-to-many relationship in my database between Person and Widget. A Person in an administrative role has access to ALL Widgets. In my application, I want to see which Widgets a Person has access to.

I have two high level options:

  1. Explicitly manage the relationships. When a Person becomes an administrator, relate that Person to all existing Widgets. When a Widget is created, relate that Widget to all existing administrators.

  2. At run-time, if the Person is an administrator, assume they have access to ALL widgets and bypass the relationship table when loading Widgets.

Is one option better than the other? Is there a name for this scenario?

I have been trying to apply option 2 using NHibernate and I can’t seem to figure out how to get it to bypass the relationship table when loading all Widgets for an entity (and even if I could, this would unnecessarily load alot of information unless I load Widgets separately from the Person entity and apply paging).

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I would map this by means of Roles.

    Roles : Person = 1 : Many

    So when you create a person, you also create a new Role, unless they are an Administrator in which case they use the existing Admin Role.

    Then the problem is easy: You need a WidgetRole table.

    When a new Widget is created, and entry is automatically added to the WidgetRole table for NewWidget, AdminRole

    When a Person changes to an Admin Role, simply change their current Role.

    imo this setup is logically simpler, than having a special Admin case.

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