what r u designing?
links provide shear resistance acting in tension to hold back the diagonal shear crack in a beam in flexure.
your horizontal shear can be taken care by shear studs if you say casting a composite steel-concrete deck. then u have to know the shear stress at the interface
well....i'll model the substructure and superstructure separately.
depending on the fixity of your pile ends, the moment in the pilecap can be quite significant. will end up with a heavy reinforced pilecap. this obviuosly is directly linked to whatever load you put on top (from the superstructure.
you need a structural analysis approach to consider your problem.
well, depending on the resultant forces and moments from your "structural frame" and what type of foundation u r considering; possible failure mode:
bearing capacity failure, pile structural failure...