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Let's say I'm modelling an organizational hierarchy which consists of Divisions that contain Departments that contain Teams. So Division -> Department -> Team.

While it makes sense for the Division class to contain a collection of Departments, should the Department class contain its parent Division object or just the parent Division's identifier?

I can see how having the parent object immediately available is convenient but I'm concerned about circular references.

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    This is a pretty common occurence with Entity Framework and does not introduce circular dependency problems. Did you have any real problem in mind? Commented Mar 16, 2016 at 15:16
  • Performance mostly. I didn't want a case where I pull a Division and it loads a list of Departments which each load the parent Division which loads the list of Departments again and again. Commented Mar 16, 2016 at 15:17
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    Don't worry about it, EF is smart enough to handle this scenario. Division would have a collection of Departments, and each of these department would have a reference to that Division object. Commented Mar 16, 2016 at 15:21

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