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Best practice for own Shapes? [message #757486]

Fri, 18 November 2011 10:48

Christian B
Messages: 68
Registered: August 2011

Member

Hi,

Say we have this example, a ContainerShape which has two Anchors and three child shapes.

http://s7.directupload.net/images/111118/jh4cousb.jpg

For now if i want Access to a child or an anchor I use following code:

shapeA1 = containerA.getChildren().get(0);
shapeA2 = containerA.getChildren().get(1);
shapeA3 = containerA.getChildren().get(2);
anchorA1 = containerA.getAnchors()containerShape.get(0);
anchorA2 = containerA.getAnchors()containerShape.get(1);

But what i would like to have is a extra class for the ContainerA with methods

shapeA1 = containerA.getShapeA1();
shapeA2 = containerA.getShapeA2();
shapeA3 = containerA.getShapeA3();
anchorA1 = containerA.getAnchorA1();
anchorA2 = containerA.getAnchorA2()

So the question is, what is the best practice for adding own shapes?
Do I have to extend the peCreateService, so I can implement a method like peCreateService.createContainerA()?

thx for your help!

[Updated on: Fri, 18 November 2011 10:50]

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Re: Best practice for own Shapes? [message #757505 is a reply to message #757486]

Fri, 18 November 2011 11:55

Andreas Graf
Messages: 129
Registered: July 2009

Senior Member

Hi,

I don't think that overriding methods will help you, since the shape ecore model is fixed and you will not be able to store your own attributes.
We do it by having our own class hierarchy of "SmartShapes", mapping those to Graphiti Shapes and storing data in properties.

Regards,

Andreas

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Re: Best practice for own Shapes? [message #757693 is a reply to message #757505]

Mon, 21 November 2011 04:23

Christian B
Messages: 68
Registered: August 2011

Member

hmkay, i thought of that, too. In a feature, for example, you get the pictogramElement by context.getPictogramElement(). Now you would have to generate the smart shape by mapping the properties to the attributes of the smart shape...

I don't know, if i like this solution, it just generates overhead by mapping smart shape <--> shape. But it might be necessary, if shapes get to complex.

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Re: Best practice for own Shapes? [message #758494 is a reply to message #757486]

Wed, 23 November 2011 07:58

Michael Wenz
Messages: 1272
Registered: July 2009
Location: Walldorf, Germany

Senior Member

In the end this turns out to be a matter of identifying shapes somehow. I
see 2 possibilities to do that:
1) Using the linking mechanism
2) Using properties as Andreas pointed out
To ease both ways a proven way to ge is introducing service methods that
retrieve the required object from another one.

HTH,
Michael

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