[Cxxgui-devel] Data_view rows

[David T. <dkt...@te...>]

Hi everyone

The data_view widget represents a columned list.  It implements an
STL-style interface to an ordered list of rows, through what I call a
"bridged iterator" mechanism.  Bridged iterators are RAII wrappers
around iterator objects that use virtual dispatch to connect to a
declared (but not defined) container.  These are understandably quite
heavy-weight.

The question is what the "row" interface should look like.  I originally
designed it to be a list of items with iterators, much like the list,
but this is a bit too heavy (and hard to implement!) for my liking.  I'm
considering reducing it to something like this:

class row
{
    datum& operator [](int idx);
    const datum& operator  [](int idx) const;
    datum& operator [](const std::string& column_name);
    const datum& operator [](const std::string& column_name) const;
};

(In other words, no iterators).  Datum, by the way, is a key/value pair
much like std::map::value_type.

Any thoughts on the subject?  Does anyone know of a lighter mechanism
than bridged iterators?

Zhuo Qiang has joined the development team, and I'm going to ask him to
do the Win32 implementation of the data_view (once I've done some
commenting and documentation, which is what I'm doing now).  I'm doing
the GTK data_view.  Anybody else who'd like to work on other widgets,
please let me know.

Regards
David Turner