I must weigh in with Paul on this one guys. I see a lot of potential uses for uniquely identifying FeatureSchemas. I guess that I would call this a FeatureType. If you are curious about the applications of defining and uniquely identifying FeatureTypes just take a look at the ESRI Geodatabase. (For example, FeatureTypes would allow you to specify a range of allowed values for an attribute.) I believe in ESRI FeatureTypes are called FeatureClasses.
I also don't think that it is unreasonable to specify that an OpenJUMP project contain no duplicate FeatureTypes. However, I do see that we allow Layers to have the same name, which I think is a bad thing... I guess that I never noticed this before. Martin wrote: "This all seems like a lot of extra complexity to support something that at the moment is really only your own use case. Perhaps you should publish this as a plugin for now, and if it gets used a lot then the JUMP project can think about incorporating it in the core." I would agree with Martin on this point. I don't think it would be to difficult to encapsulate a system for uniquely identifying FeatureSchema's in a plug-in. You'd could automatically add the Layer name (as the unique ID for the FeatureSchema) and a reference to the FeatureSchema for a FeatureCollection to a HashMap in the plug-in. If the user tried to create a Layer with a duplicate name you could create an error message. Or you could prompt the user to enter a name for a FeatureSchema when creating a layer, although this might be more confusing for them. I think the best solution would be to allow users to assign a unique FeatureType or FeatureSchema to the Layers that they select (after the Layers had been created, of course). That way we aren't forcing this on users that have no need for it. You could capture the relationship between the FeatureSchema, Layer, and unique FeatureSchema indentification at the time that the user made the association. If you want it to be really easy you could automatically fill the unique id text box with the name of the Layer that the user selected for the association. That would solve your reflection problem. You would never need to ask a FeatureSchema if it had a unique name. You could just see if there was a unique id associated with the instance of FeatureSchema by asking the plug-in. If Paul think's he would be interested in doing something with FeatureTypes or uniquely identified FeatureSchemas via a plug-in I'd be interested in the design, as I think this really is something that I will want to tap into in the future. The Sunburned Surveyor ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by DB2 Express Download DB2 Express C - the FREE version of DB2 express and take control of your XML. No limits. Just data. Click to get it now. http://sourceforge.net/powerbar/db2/ _______________________________________________ Jump-pilot-devel mailing list Jump-pilot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/jump-pilot-devel
