Question

Looking for some general advice here.

Option 1.
Would it be best to have all of the main database objects (say Contact, User, Customer, etc. have their general classes in DAL with nested classes for db objects that depend on the main objects (ContactAddress, UserEmail, etc… these would have multiple values so they are contained in separate tables).

OR

Option 2.
Would it be better to have completely separate DAL classes for things like ContactAddress, etc. and combine these elements in a business layer?

Let me know if I’m not making sense here.

Answer 1

It usually aids in discovery if you put all public classes at the namespace level (instead of as inner classes).

The two examples you cited, could be generalized with no harm:

ContactAddress becomes Address

UserEmail becomes Email

This way, you can reuse them later if you wish.