Parent Object

We previously discussed the own-list. This is RedBeanPHP's version of a one-to-many relationship. However, if we look from the other end of the relationship we have a many-to-one relationship: many buildings belong to one village. Suppose you are working on this end of the relationship; you have a building, how can you access its village?

We call this the parent bean. The term 'parent' may be confusing but on the other hand it clearly indicates that on the other side the bean is part of a list owned by another bean.

You can unset the parent bean like this:

Trying to assign something other than a bean to a parent object field will throw an exception:

Once a property has been used to store a bean, it can only be used to store a bean afterwards.