Data_Structures_in_NiCE

• NiCE's Data Structures: Overview
• NiCEObject
• Entry
• DataComponent
• NiCEResource
• OutputComponent
• TableComponent
• Form
• References

NiCE's Data Structures: Overview

NiCE's data structure is a complex,

--Need picture here of the entire hierarchy of NiCE.

NiCEObject

NiCEObject is the base class for all classes in NiCE that manipulate, contain, or represent data. NiCEObjects are uniquely identifiable by their identification numbers and are persistent. NiCEObject implements Java's Cloneable interface for creating deep copies and also provides a public copy operation to copy into an existing NiCEObject. NiCEObjects can be marshalled and unmarshalled to XML using the loadFromXML() and persistToXML() operations.

Operations are defined for most of the attributes and capabilities of the NiCEObject class, but some work in required by subclasses. Subclasses must override the clone() operation if they extend NiCEObject by adding attributes. They should provide a custom implementation of copy() that is specific to their own type to do a deep copy (i.e. copy(a:myType) instead of a copy(a:NiCEObject)) since NiCEObject.copy() only copies the attributes of NiCEObjects. They must also override the loadFromXML operation to copy the XML data properly from the XMLLoader (because NiCE uses JAXB to bind XML to NiCEObjects and its sublclasses).

--Taken from the javaDocs on NiCEObject.

--Need picture from UML diagrams

Entry

The Entry class is responsible for collecting and managing the values needed by the Item to perform a task. The Entry class is capable of checking bounds and validity.

The "readiness" of an Entry is used map dependencies between Entries and other Entries. An Entry may depend on a parent Entry and passing the correct key-value pair to the update() operation will mark the Entry as ready or not ready depending on the state of the parent. All Entries default to ready. The changed or modified state of the Entry is similar in that it distinguishes whether or not an Entry has been recently modified.

The Entry implements IUpdateable to update the state of the Entry based on key-value pairs. The base default implementation of update() will mark the Entry as "ready" (isReady() will return true) if the name of the Entry's parent is passed as the key and one of "ready," "yes," "y," "on," "true" or "enabled" is passed as the value (minus the commas of course). It will mark the Entry as not ready (isReady() will return false) if the value is "not ready," "no," "n," "off," "false" or "disabled" instead. Neither set of values are case sensitive ("Yes" will work as well as "yes"). It also resets the "changed" state of the Entry to false to reflect that review is required because of new information from the update. This operation should be overridden by subclasses to get tailored update behavior, but Entry.update should be called still (by using "super.update()") to handle updating because of parents and setting the changed state.</p>

Managing the readiness of the Entry with update in the base class allows NiCE to generically handle the almost trivial case of dependencies where one Entry needs to know about the state of another before revealing itself. The Entry can also be marked as "secret" to indicate that its contents should not be displayed openly. Entries should be marked secret in their setup() operation. There is no public operation to mark them as secret, although there is an isSecret() operation to determine whether or not an Entry is secret. Entry's may be "tagged" with values that act as secondary names or unique identifiers in systems outside of NiCE. This is particularly useful for creating files based on key-value pairs of Entry names and values, but the name of the Entry needs to be some condensed or modified form of the human readable name returned by getName().

Entry is a subclass of NiCEObject. It overrides NiCEObject.copy(), NiCEObject.clone() and NiCEObject.loadFromXML() as specified and required by the NiCEObject class.

-- Taken from JavaDocs on Entry

-- Possibly provide a table of operations with documentation on each?

-- Need picture of Entry

DataComponent

The DataComponent class is a container for Entries and behaves as a Component from the UpdateableComposite package. The class is used contain a set of Entries that are related to each other in some way and to accept updates from dispatched from the Registry.

--Taken from JavaDocs on DataComponent

NiCEResource

The Resource class represents persistent data resources used by NiCE and the other software packages with which it interacts. This includes files containing simulation input and output data, movies and plots, amongst others.

OutputComponent

The OutputComponent is a specialization of Component that is used to manage output data on a Form. Output data represented by NiCEResources can be very easily added to OutputComponents by calling the addResource() operation and the whole list of managed NiCEResources can be retrieved with getResources().

Notifications are not provided on OutputComponents if their names, ids or descriptions change. These should not change in general because there is only a single output component for all of the output. It only provides notifications when NiCEResources are added.

--Taken from JavaDocs

TableComponent

The TableComponent class is a Component that contains a set of Entries that are related to each other within a single row of a table and it can contain many rows. Each row of the table contains a set of Entries that only make sense when they are considered as a set, such as "Hostname," "Operating System" and "Install Path" for a particular executable application or script. The structure of the Table is defined by its "Row Template" that contains a default Entry for each column. So, if we wanted a table with a column for "Hostname," "Operating System" and "Install Path" we would set the row template on the TableComponent with a set of three Entries, one for each property, that describes the default configuration. The row template is the canonical row configuration of the TableComponent. Once the template is set it can not be changed, although it can be retrieved for reference. Adding a row to the table creates a copy of the template and assumes the default values, which can be edited after retrieving the row. Rows may be deleted and if a row is deleted it will result in the entire table being re-ordered to keep the row numbers sequential.

--Taken from JavaDocs on TableComponent.

Form

--Taken from JavaDocs on Form

References