[java-gnome-hackers] Re: [Java-gnome-checkins] CVS: java-gnome/gtk TODO.gtk,1.38,1.39

['Mark H. <mh...@ca...>]

On Fri, Feb 20, 2004 at 10:23:48AM -0500, Jeffrey Morgan wrote:
> 2) The tree control and related classes are a critical component
> of the bindings.  Since Mark is busy I plan to spend next week
> working on these classes.  Mark, you could really help by sending
> an email that would provide an overview of these classes, how they
> work together, what you were able to complete and what remains.  
I'll try but I'm not sure when.

> During my review I added that we should change a couple of the 
> classes to Interfaces since they are implemented this way in gtk. 
> I did this for FileChooser and implemented a FileChooserHelper 
> class to actually implement those methods so there was no 
> duplication of code.  Does this make sence for the Tree widgets?
I guess. We should probably do the same for the sortable interface for
trees.

> Also, I am not real happy with the class name DataBlock.  What these 
> really represent are column types.  I know this would break
> a lot of code but we should discuss this before our API freeze.
> Could we change this to something like ColumnType? Also, could
> these be stored as members of the store so calls to setValue
> would not need to pass them as a parameter.  setValue could then
> just pass a 0 based column number. 
1) Having two things called columns related to the same widget is
confusing. TreeViews have columns (things you see) and treemodels have
columns (for storing a particular type of data). Perhaps DataColumn or
DataStoreColumn would be better? It is not merely a ColumnType since the
integer value refers to a particular column; however, it is not an
object which stores the data of a column, just acts like a pointer to
the data.
DataBlock might not be the best name, but I still think it's better than
ColumnType. 

2) By using these rather than integers, we can enforce that the correct
type of object is being passed to setValue/getValue and so can overload
them.  I think this is the most important point. 

3) Having named object rather than integers is far more intuitive when
programming.

What do you think?

-- 
  .''`. Mark Howard
 : :' :
 `. `'  http://www.tildemh.com 
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