The properties within a parent script are equivalent to instance variables.
But I want to implement the equivalent of a class variable in my parent
script, so that all child objects created from that parent script can take
into account the value held within that class variable when performing tasks
within their instance methods.
Now, in my particular case, I'm not creating discrete child objects that
each live in a world of their own. All the child objects created from my
parent script are nodes within a tree (an XML document), with one of those
child objects representing the root of that tree. The root has child nodes,
and those child nodes have child nodes, etc. Taking that into consideration,
I though that I had come up with a fairly simple way of faking a class
variable.
If I were to maintain the tree as a linked list (meaning, if the parent
script had a property which held a reference to the child object which is
its parent node), I would always be able to recurse to the root from any
node and retrieve the value held within the "class variable" property in the
root node child object. Since the root node child object never changes for
the existence of the tree, setting a property value in the root would be the
same as setting the value for all the children, as long as they all went to
the root to look for that value.
The problem with this approach is that every time a node is called upon to
execute its method for forming the textual version of its part of the XML
document, it must take that walk up the linked list to get the value of that
property from the root node. It's the same walk for every single element
within an XML document. And you know how complex XML docs can get.
It works. But it seems terribly ineffient to me.
My questions are:
Is there a better way to implement a class variable in a parent script?
And, is the answer going to be "use a global"? I hope not, because I don't
want to.
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Christopher Watson
Sr. Software Engineer
Lightspan, Inc.
http://www.lightspan.com/
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