[OT] DAO ... where to draw the line?

[Matthew J. Vincent]

[OFF TOPIC]
I know this is a struts forum, but as struts developers using DAOs, 
where do your DAO implementation draw the line? 

For example:
Let''s say I have three tables:
Employee (contains employee_id, employee_name,  and dept_id)
Department (contains dept_id, dept_name, loc_id)
Location (contains loc_id, location_name)
How deep do your classes go to replicate the data? 

Do you do this...
public class Employee {
   private int id;
   private String name;
   private int deptId;   // just the id
   // .. implementation details
}
or do you do this
public class Employee {
   private int id;
   private String name;
   private Department dept;  // all of the data
   // .. implementation details
}
and so on and so on.   Class Department has the same type of problem.  
Does it hold just the id for location or a variable class Location?

Should DAOs just fill in the id (keys) so it is up to the application 
using the DAOs to get the Employee class, then the Department class, and 
the the Location class like:

Employee emp = EmployeDAO.getEmployee(1);
Department dept = DepartmentDAO.getDepartment(emp.getDeptId());
Location loc = LocationDAO.getLocation(dept.getLocId());
System.out.println(emp.getEmpName() + " works in " + loc.getLocationName());
or
Employee emp = EmployeDAO.getEmployee(1);
System.out.println(emp.getEmpName() + " works in " + 
emp.getDept().getLoc().getLocationName());

Now this is just a simple example, but where do you draw the line?  It's 
possible to go on and on and on and cycle back to employee...

Any thoughts, links, tips, best practices, whatvere would be helpful!
Thanks!
Matt
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