First of all, thank you for your link. It has been bookmarked and I am going to give it a read. I'm sure you have your uses here but being personable is obviously not a strong point of yours ledmike. If you are trying to be helpful or teach someone then being a condescending troll is not the best way of going about it. However, if your intention IS to be a troll, then well done friend. If you had considered this topic to be 'beneath you' then nobody was forcing you to post your stereotypical RTFM comment. Is the rest of this forum so unfriendly to people that are just trying to learn? I won't be sticking around to find out.

Thanks for your reply, however I usually do Google, and have only come to a forum on this one occasion to engage in a discussion rather than look at dry documents.

Hi everyone, I am a software developer that is looking to improve the way I design my classes... In my classes usually I have a constructor where an ID or some identifier is passed in, the constructor then goes off to the database and populates that objects member variables. A 'save' of an object would find the relevant record in the database and overwrite it's data. What's all this I've been hearing about a separate data access layer - how would you go about implementing one. I have been thinking for a while that this is a bad design (should you get the data before you create the instance of the class and pass this to the constructor?) and if this is the case, wouldn't you just be moving the SQL into the UI or the calling method... Does my way of doing this look as messy as I feel like it does; and is there any way around having to code each and every member variable into the class, and corresponding GET/SET methods? It feels like each class I design takes at least an hour each to hand code all the even generic getters and setters never mind the logic of the actual class itself and then is full of messy SQL Select and Update statements. I guess I'm after a pointer to an 'architecture 101' type tutorial :) Thanks in advance for any pointers/ideas.