Designing Object Models

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Designing a custom object model can be a tricky business. If you dive in and start coding right away, you may find yourself realizing in the middle of your development process that your design is less than ideal. It pays to take some time to think through an object model, and even draw diagrams and make notes by hand. You may also want to study other object models to understand how they were constructed. When you design an object model, you are taking abstract processes and imposing concrete relationships upon them. In essence, you are creating artificial conceptual divisions for your code.

This section includes some suggestions to get you started on object model design. Two of the sample files on the Office 2000 Developer CD-ROM, EnumWindows.xls and ListComboWiz.xla, include custom object models that demonstrate the basic concepts of object model design. A complete discussion of the intricacies of object model design, however, is beyond the scope of this book. For other books that delve more deeply into this subject, see "Where to Go from Here" at the end of this chapter.