Towards the end of 0.6 it was discovered that there were issues with
certain Item subclass constructor signatures not working well with the
repository and/or schema APIs. To address this, Andi changed the base Item
constructor signature to use parameter names consistent with the resulting
Item's attribute names. That is, the constructor signature is:
Item(itsName, itsParent, itsKind)
I also undertook a lot of refactoring to get rid of Item subclass __init__
methods throughout the OSAF parcels, in order to prep for making this
change complete. However, there were a few modules with complex __init__
methods, and rather than destabilize we decided to wait until the 0.7
timeframe to finish this cleanup.
I've almost finished that cleanup now, but there are some issues. One of
the reasons for making the change is that there are a *lot* of things with
'name', 'parent', or 'kind' attributes or keywords that are not an item's
repository name, parent, or kind. For example, some collections have a
'kind' attribute which is not the same as the collection's 'itsKind'
attribute, if you see what I mean.
Unfortunately, through 0.6 these both had the same parameter name, so there
is some possibility that I've messed up the conversion in some areas that
the test suites don't cover. After I did the initial round of conversion
using unit tests as a basis, I did some greps and found that there was an
awful lot of unconverted calls, that couldn't have worked and therefore
must not be being invoked by our unit tests. So, I've made some effort to
update the code that's not covered by tests, but of course it's hard to
confirm whether I might also have broken anything else.
Anyway, I'd like to suggest that we establish a convention of using
parameters named 'itsName', 'itsParent', 'itsKind', and 'itsView' *ONLY*
for calls to routines that create items or set that attribute of an item,
and never use them as attributes of objects other than repository Items.
I'd also like to suggest that we *NEVER* use 'view' as a parameter or
attribute name when it's a repository view, instead using 'rv' or
'repoView'. This will be especially important if we start to have other
kinds of views in 0.7 (e.g. of the MVC or MVP variety). I haven't actually
started implementing this yet, as I want to get the other changes wrapped
and checked in first.
Comments? Questions?
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
Open Source Applications Foundation "Dev" mailing list
http://lists.osafoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/dev
