Re: [Passwordsafe-devel] Code docu, parameter validation, CMyString

[Rony S. <ro...@gm...>]

 Hi,

Good questions, all. Here are my replies:

- Doxygen is cool, and adding comments so that they can be parsed by it
would be great. If you (or anyone) cares to write a "template" .h and .cpp
file showing how to do this, that would help a lot.

- Regarding parameter validation:
The approach I like is that parameters that can be wrong due to programming
errors should be checked by "ASSERT" statements. This is especially true for
pointers that should never be NULL. parameters that can be bad due to user
input or runtime errors (such as a file that failed ot open) should be
checked in the non-debug version as well. In the example you described, I
consider having CXMLprefs::Load() called with an invalid filename a
programming error, which should be detected & prevented by higher levels.

- CMyString started out as a wrapper/replacement for CString, with the main
difference in that the destructor "wipes" the text that the object held, so
as not to leave potentially sensitive data floating around in memory. The
current convention is for CString to be used for insensitve data, and
CMyString to be used otherwise. If I were to code the project from scratch
today, I'd probably use std::string instead of CString, and define a
SecureString class for sensitive text...

	Cheers,

		Rony

-----Original Message-----
From: pas...@li...
[mailto:pas...@li...] On Behalf Of
Steffen Ryll
Sent: Tuesday, March 13, 2007 1:16 AM
To: pas...@li...
Subject: [Passwordsafe-devel] Code docu, parameter validation, CMyString

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Hi,

a few question for which I couldn't find answers:

- - do you have any conventions for code documentation (e.g. descriptions
what methods do and what their parameters mean)? Possibly an approach,
that allows to generate HTML or similar out out comments strinkled over
the code..
If not, what about using doxygen (http://www.stack.nl/~dimitri/doxygen)?
It can generate HTML, PDF etc. from specially marked code comments,
comparable to javadoc. If haven't chosen such a tool yet, I will write a
 config file for doxygen


- - do you have any conventions/ a rule of thumb, where parameters should
be validated and where we trust they are correct?
I made some enhancements to the unit tests (not in svn yet) during the
weekend and asked myself whether it makes sense to add validations.
For instance, if you instantiate CXMLprefs with an empty or non-existent
file name, the first Load() call asserts. Is this worth fixing or do we
rely on parameter validation in higher-level classes?

- - Is it correct that CMyString is intended as a wrapper around MFC's
CString, in order to improve portability?
This confuses me a little bit, because CString is used so often in other
classes (I looked only into corelib).


Cheers,

Steffen
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