First, my thanks to Chris and Steve for responding to my last post. I will think about using arrays rather than lists. I am still confused, though, and guess I need to better spell things out. So ...
I want to create a teacher's gradebook type program. Courses have students and assignments. Because there are different types of assignments it makes sense to have a TAssignment base class from which to derive assignment classes which include things like properties for additional teacher comments or "rubric" data. (A rubric is essentially a grid with specialized assignment expectations in one column and evaluations of student performance on an expectation in the next column.) A course, of course, also includes TStudent objects. I get confused in a couple key areas. First, I am uncertain what class in which to place student scores on an assignment. At first it seemed like pointsEarned should be a property in TAssignment, next to pointsPossible. But then I recognized that every TStudent object would need a list (or array) of TAssignments. So, perhaps pointsEarned on an assignment should be part of TStudent--some sort of list/array with items that paired pointsEarned with corresponding TAssignments? How would that work? ... Help! :-) Next, once I have this complicated arrangement between TCourse, TAssignment, and TStudent objects worked out I still have to figure out how to save everything. In my head I think about how easy and powerful it is to just drop DataSource and ClientDataSet components on a form and create a MyBase file. This object oriented arrangement sounds more complicated, esp. since components are dropped on a form & we are talking here about doing all the work in classes other than the main form. I have learned a lot recently about object oriented programming. I finally see its power. But I'm really stuck on issues related to figuring out where to place properties and methods, sometimes, and general routines related to reading and writing data encapsulated in objects. As always, thanks for reading this far! -- Al C. _______________________________________________ Delphi mailing list -> Delphi@elists.org http://www.elists.org/mailman/listinfo/delphi
