OpendTect
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OpendTect Top Level. More...
OpendTect Top Level.
'Real systems have no top' (Betrand Meyer). What he meant is that real sytems cannot be characterised by a single function which can be split up into smaller functions and so on - the classical functional decomposition problem. Still, Object-oriented systems tend to have a top - a top level object containing or initiating the work.
In OpendTect, this object is of the class uiODMain. There is one instance which is accessible through the global function ODMainWin().
If you go down the responsibility graph from here you will find yourself in the world of the 'Application Logic'. This is software with the sole purpose of making this application do its work. In OO systems, as much intelligence and functionality needs to be put in general-purpose objects. In that sense, the usage of application logic objects needs to be minimised, and generalised objects re-usable in other applications should be preferred.
OpendTect obeys that rule but still a considerable amount of application-specific coding is unavoidable, especially in the area of the user interface. And in larger systems things get out of hand in no time because of the complexity of the task to manage everything. Therefore, we designed some 'complexity-stoppers'. The trouble with those kind of objects is that they themselves make it harder to understand what's going on in the system. It is much easier to understand:
"object A uses object B and C and then displays using D."
than:
"object A asks its service manager S that it needs input data. S asks B and C for the data and passes it to A. A does its thing and reports S it's ready. S then asks D to display the data it asks from A."
In reality it's even worse than this. We wouldn't have done that if OpendTect were a nice little app of a few thousand lines of code. That is not the case. In larger systems dependency management is the name of the game. It becomes important to figure out what object 'knows' about what other objects and who is responsible for what. Further it becomes increasingly important to not only hide low-level details from high-level functionality, but also to make them independent of it. This is the foundation of the 'Dependency Inversion' principle. In the overview of the Programmer's manual you will see a reference to documentation on this.
As things are, two major things need to be introduced: the top-level manager objects and their responsibilities, and the 'Part Server' architecture.
First of all, the top-level manager objects. This is fairly straightforward. The application level problems are foremost:
All these things are uiODMain's responsibilities. The last item is done 'directly' by uiODMain (of course it uses some fairly high level objects to do that, but still). The first three are delegated to three closely cooperating manager objects: uiODMenuMgr, uiODSceneMgr, and uiODApplMgr .
To go to the second issue we'll ask the question: how does the application manager (the uiODApplMgr instance) get things done? Answer: it asks its 'Part Manager' objects to do the work. The only thing uiODApplMgr does is coordinate everything. The next question then is: what is such a 'Part Manager'? Answer: an object providing services for a certain type of things needed in OpendTect.
Example: The menu manager finds out that the user wants to do attribute editing (probably a menu item or button was clicked). The menu manager asks the application manager to take care of that. The application manager knows this is Attribute stuff, so it uses its uiAttribPartServer instance: it calls the editSet() method. During the editing however, the attrib part server may need data or services that are not strictly 'attribute' stuff. For example, when the user presses 'direct display' of attribute the attrib part server must know where to calculate the current attribute and it needs to deliver the data when finished.
When a part server needs external data or when it has info that may be important for other part servers, it calls the 'sendEvent()' method to notify (via its 'uiApplService' instance) the application manager. In this case the application manager will then ask its uiVisPartServer instance about the position of the current element.
Part servers are an absolute must to keep the complexity on the application level manageable. Already things are pretty complex; if all objects would 'know' about all other objects things would get out of hand very quickly to the point that lots of bugs are very hard to solve and maintenance would be a nightmare.
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