The latter, a seperate subclass for each breed. I'll try and explain why, and maybe it'll help make things a bit clearer (fingers crossed).

The Company and Company::Division classes are a kind of framework, which AcmeLtd and AcmeLtd::IT build upon to provide specific functionality, overriding methods to do so.

..........
..........

you know, at this point lots of stuff has just clicked into place in my head, and i've realised that by changing some other stuff around, I can get rid of the requirement to start with the Company object, and just start directly with AcmeLtd (which will of course inherit generic processing functionality from Company).

I think the problems i've had in trying to figure out how to structure this have come about because i don't have the AcmeLtd class in the system right now, and all the information that is going to go into that is pulled out of config files. When i decided to add the class in, i didn't analyse the change fully, and have been trying to do things the hard way as a result.

Thanks enormously for the above reply; in trying to answer it's made me think more about the situation, and helped me understand things better myself.

hossman++ # would have voted the above reply up if i could have