Design and Architecture

14-Nov-07 3:12

HI Guys -

I'm working on an application that has a number of discrete sections to its user interface. These sections are defined in terms of what they display, what methods can be performed on them, and what events are raised.

Ideally, i'd like to put all the discrete sections into standalone controls, which can be dumped into the application shell and managed using an event driven observer model.

The problem i am facing is that in some instances i am using Trees, and i'm trying to achieve the following:

* Have a hierachial instance of objects that represent my data.
* Traverse and manipulate the data tree
* Keep the TreeViews synchronised with this data
* Hide the TreeViews / TreeNodes from any calling code (It's already wrapped in a composite control).

Are there any good patterns to do this? Has anyone encountered this kind of problem before, and have experience solving it?

Cheers

Tris

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led mike15-Nov-07 4:45

15-Nov-07 4:45

Tristan Rhodes wrote:
Are there any good patterns to do this?

Yes. Most of these patterns can found in the GOF book. Of course you should start with a MVC design and then add other patterns into that design like the Command pattern for example. With these patterns the UI components are completely isolated from the work the application does and become observers of events triggered by the operations of the system so they can maintain a valid display to the user.

Does that sound like what you were asking about?

Tristan Rhodes15-Nov-07 22:44

15-Nov-07 22:44

I think i made a bad decision at the start of the app. As i had no stand alone tree structure that raises change events, i implemented a derived tree and handled all the change events via the host form. Unfortunately, now that i have 3 seperate views of the same data, it would be more desirable to have the data seperate and give a handle to each of the controls to make it self synchronising (Via a property or something).

Would this be a good way to go? Or should the model be linked to the Observer, and that keep things synchronised with the views?

Additionaly, is it common practice to nest observers? i.e. Would you have an observer to keep three tree views and a tree model synchronised, then another observer to manage the Tree Model + the rest of the application?

Just playing with ideas on where to go in the future.

Cheers

Tris

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Carrier Bags - 21st Century Tumbleweed.

led mike19-Nov-07 12:00

19-Nov-07 12:00

Tristan Rhodes wrote:
Or should the model be linked to the Observer, and that keep things synchronised with the views?

Do you know MVC? If not start with the Wikipedia page for it. In MVC, Views subscribe to notifications from the Model.

Tristan Rhodes wrote:
Additionaly, is it common practice to nest observers? i.e. Would you have an observer to keep three tree views and a tree model synchronised, then another observer to manage the Tree Model + the rest of the application?

Not sure what all that means, perhaps you are overusing "tree". There is no reason to be specific about User Interface Tree Control. Just generalize that to Views, period. What each view does to manage any controls it may own is it's business.

When the user interacts with the UI, the UI handler passes the message to the Controller in MVC. It is the Controller that coordinates that message into whatever system services pertain to that operation. Any one event may result in Model notification messages being sent. Using that design is how you might synchronize different views. Also other patterns can be used to implement synchronization like an extended Command Pattern to contain command state information.

Does that help?

Tristan Rhodes22-Nov-07 4:59

22-Nov-07 4:59

Hi Mike,

Thanks, yes, that helped. I've been doing some more research into MVC and guess i originally misinterpreted it. I've now separated the model from the view and the controller is the host form.

So what i have ended up with is:

* A Generic Tree that raises events on change and can be serialized
* A composite control set that takes an instance of the above Tree and observes it, keeping synchronized. This custom control also raises user events.
* A Controller that handles all events from all controls, and manipulates the Generic Tree; cascading changes to any observing views.

That seems to be a really nice way of doing things, and I'm really happy with it. I feel as though the penny has finally dropped for that particular way of thinking.

Cheers Big Grin | :-D

Tris

Question: Does the fact that the composite control also raises user events change its role in anyway? Or is that perfectly acceptable?

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3D architecture

rsaint2713-Nov-07 7:56

rsaint27

13-Nov-07 7:56

Hello,

For this project I'm going to develop, I have to implement the base structure of a system that holds data taken from 3D files.
The basic structure I've implemented is:

class 3DPoint
{
//Point data
}

class 3DLine
{
List<3DPoint>...
// class methods
}

class 3DModel
{
List<3DLine>...
// class methods
}

So far this works well, and it suits my needs.

Now I want to derive these classes to allow drawing with OpenGl, because I need some specific fields like "visibility, selected, ...", and that's when I ran into some troubles, because when I derive 3DModel (gl3DModel), I'm forced to use the class 3DLine, and not the derived class (gl3DLine), and the same with 3DPoint.

Does any of you have any suggestion on how to do this?

Thanks!

Re: 3D architecture

Tristan Rhodes14-Nov-07 3:26

Calling UDDI services from DNA platform

14-Nov-07 3:26

I think you should seperate the functionality from the data objects, similar to the way you would seperate database records from the actual database provider logic / queries.

Instead, implement a renderer base class that takes the above primitives, then derive that for OpenGL / D3D.

That way you could do:

Renderer r = new D3DRenderer();
r.Render(myModels);

Hope that helps

Tris

-------------------------------

Carrier Bags - 21st Century Tumbleweed.

GuimaSun12-Nov-07 8:43

GuimaSun

12-Nov-07 8:43

Hi, my company is installing the BEA SOA platform, and the legacy platform is DNA. So, we have to make calls to service registry to discover endpoints, the service registry implements UDDI.
I can study the UDDI interfaces and encapsulate the calls, but I'd like to know if there is any component ready to use.

Thanks for any tip.

GuimaSun
www.nexsun.com.br
NEXSUN TechZone

instruction executed per second by a microprocessor

akhshay gandhi12-Nov-07 7:11

akhshay gandhi

12-Nov-07 7:11

what program i need to write to find out number of instuctions executed per second by my processor.

i thought of sending an interrupt after 1 second to an executing program(loop) which has counter, so by calculating difference between initial and final value of counter for that program(loop) we can find out instruction executed per second. but unfortunetly i don't know how to send timing interrupt.

i need suggestions and guidance.

thank you

Re: instruction executed per second by a microprocessor

Luc Pattyn12-Nov-07 7:40

Luc Pattyn

12-Nov-07 7:40

Hi,

the general question you ask needs an entire book to contain a general answer.

Here are some facts:

1.
you are in the wrong forum, it is not a software design/archiotecture issue, it depends
foremost on the specific hardware.

2.
Most microprocessors have some kind of NOP instruction, and can execute that in 1 cycle.
So a 1GHz CPU (single core, no hyperthreading, ...) could execute 1 billion of those
in one second.

3.
More complex instructions may/will take longer; more so for CISC than for RISC.
A divide instruction may take 35 cycles or so (or not be available at all).

4.
Instruction scheduling nowadays complicates matter a lot: instructions don't always
get executed at maximum theoretical speed due to scheduling constraints.

5.
Memory bandwidth issues may slow things down (code cache misses, data cache misses,
table walk delays)

6.
Other system activity may reduce the throughput you are interested in: e.g. interrupts
dealing with timer ticks, network traffic, ...

Smile | :)

Luc Pattyn [Forum Guidelines] [My Articles]

this months tips:
- use PRE tags to preserve formatting when showing multi-line code snippets
- before you ask a question here, search CodeProject, then Google

Good UML tool

Oshtri Deka12-Nov-07 0:33

Oshtri Deka

12-Nov-07 0:33

Hi!
Can you recommend me good UML tool with ability of code and/or database generation?
Something affordable Big Grin | :-D

Re: Good UML tool

Tristan Rhodes14-Nov-07 3:21

14-Nov-07 3:21

StarUML

Free, open source, has code gen. Don't think it supports DB stuff tho.

T

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Re: Good UML tool

tnotstar31-Jan-08 9:08

tnotstar

31-Jan-08 9:08

Do you now StarUML...
(http://staruml.sourceforge.net/en/[^]).

May be good for sketchs!

-aah

Scheduling Design

yoavyoavyoav10-Nov-07 19:53

yoavyoavyoav

10-Nov-07 19:53

Hi there,

I'm building an .net application that will run various SQL reports according to given schedules.

My question is - what is the best way to implement a scheduler ?
The ideas I came up with were :

1) Creating a service for the application
2) Using windows scheduled tasks
3) Minimizing the application to the notification area in the bottom-right of the taskbar , and let it just sit in the memory and run the reports on its own.

I'm not sure if these ideas are any good.. it's just what I came up with and it's my first time messing with schdules.

Thanks.

Re: Scheduling Design

Paul Conrad27-Jan-08 7:12

Paul Conrad

27-Jan-08 7:12

Have you come up with any good ideas?

"I guess it's what separates the professionals from the drag and drop, girly wirly, namby pamby, wishy washy, can't code for crap types." - Pete O'Hanlon

Re: Scheduling Design

yoavyoavyoav27-Jan-08 7:20

yoavyoavyoav

27-Jan-08 7:20

Yes ,

I've used The wonderful task scheduler wrapper : http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/tsnewlib.aspx[^]

by Dennis Austin.

It works very well and is very very simple to implement.

Re: Scheduling Design

Paul Conrad27-Jan-08 7:21

Paul Conrad

27-Jan-08 7:21

Very cool looking article. Thanks for the link Big Grin | :-D

"I guess it's what separates the professionals from the drag and drop, girly wirly, namby pamby, wishy washy, can't code for crap types." - Pete O'Hanlon

I/O Port Pattern

Ju@ncho7-Nov-07 8:04

Ju@ncho

7-Nov-07 8:04

I am working in a Program that works with 3 serial ports 1 I/O Board and a Camera.
Anyone know about some design pattern made to Asynchronusly read the information on all these devices?

led mike7-Nov-07 8:13

7-Nov-07 8:13

Ju@ncho wrote:
know about some design pattern made to Asynchronusly read the information on all these devices?

I don't know about design patterns but the Windows API includes Overlapped IO features, is that what you mean?

Ju@ncho8-Nov-07 1:53

Ju@ncho

8-Nov-07 1:53

No, what i am meaning is a way to encapsulate the Overlapped IO features of serial ports plus other custom overlapped IO features of other devices (ie Adquisitions Boards)in a single design pattern. I think that the observer pattern should work but i am not sure..

led mike8-Nov-07 5:18

8-Nov-07 5:18

Ju@ncho wrote:
the Overlapped IO features of serial ports plus other custom overlapped IO features of other devices (ie Adquisitions Boards)

Ok. I know what Overlapped IO is, I know what Asynchronous is, I have no idea what "IO features of serial ports" or "custom overlapped IO features of Adquisitions Boards" are.

Ju@ncho wrote:
I think that the observer pattern should work but i am not sure..

Well the observer pattern has two sides (observable - observer) where the observer side supports multiplicity. So far you have only discussed the observable side of your scenario so we have no way of knowing if that pattern exists in your problem space. Also I have no idea how or why the "features" you referred to are related to the observer pattern.