Nice diagram ;-)
"could be designed with several Model->View->Controller rings in it"
Without getting too deep into your application, it looks like might want
to think about a Controller with set of nested state machines inside.
From what you wrote, it seems that this is where you are headed without
using the words "State machine".
If you can take a look at a State Machine Design Pattern, you will
likely find the ideas that you need to implement, elegantly laid out
We have done this is a complex ActionScript application and the State
machine in the Controller really simplified how we thought about the
Controller and eventually the implementation was fairly straightforward
and has survived a few years of maintenance and improvements without
collapsing or requiring major rewrites to handle new functionality.
Adding new states is easy and usually has no impact on existing state
(just the transition routes).
The control functions inside each state override the defaults (Interface
methods) and impose their own behaviour. If you press "next" in
"Starting of Chapter" state, you get different behaviour than you do
when you press "Next" in "Administering Test" state. (Ours is an
eLearning delivery system).
The top level of the controller only has to manage its state and make
sure that event is dispatched to the current state object. When the
controller starts, it builds its state engine(instantiates the state
objects), sets up the View, sets the initial state and waits.
I hope that this helps.
Ron
sebastian wrote:
In case it makes more sense to look at a diagram, here is my [still in
progress] UML overview of the application:
:-P
http://www.chedal.org/temp/uml_idea.png
with kind,
seb.
sebastian chedal wrote:
Hello folks,
I have a design question, the application I am building could be
designed with several Model->View->Controller rings in it. But I am
not sure what would be the best practice to connect them together...
or if MVC is even the best way to go?
In a nut shell here is what my application does:
"An 3D interface moves with the mouse around the screen. When you
click on an item, it expands to show you some info [sometimes an
flv]. If you click on "more info" button, you zoom into the 3D
navigation item and the flash view pane gets filled exclusively with
information about this navigation item.
Each navigation item has different modules of information compared to
other navigation items, and inside each module is content. There are
possibly sub pages underneath each navigation page. Naturally you can
close the page and go back to the main 3D navigation at any time."
Now where I am unsure about my UML OO design is in the approach of
the module-templates, and whether I should use multiple M->V->C
circles. I will be implementing SWFAddress [for deeplinks] and Stats,
so an overall event manager [Observer] is essential.
Logically I would imagine just 3 [nested] classes for the templates:
Page->Module(s)->Content(s)
[there can be multiple modules per page loaded dynamically and
multiple content item types loaded per module: button, text, flv
players etc.]
but if I break 'Page' into an MCV chain I would get:
SWFAdress->PageController->PageModel->PageView
[Page Controller also sends data to StatsCollectorClass for updates]
And then another chain for the modules:
?>ModuleController->ModuleModel->ModuleView
And then I presume the content would then be loaded/attached by the
'ModuleView'
My questions are:
1. Should I bother with an MCV layout? [the application needs to
built for long term use/expansion] Or just group the pages and
modules together into one class each?
2. If I do split them into separate classes, where is the point of
connection between two MCV chains? Is it from the parent model to the
child's controller? Or from the parent's controller to the child's
controller?
Thanks for your insight!
Sebastian.
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