Hi Moosers,
I have a load of very similar methods to implement and I'm sure that
there must be a better way to do it than I'm doing at present.
I have a Graph object to which you can attach Statement objects; these
Statements get stored in StatementIndex objects. There are a number of
different subclasses of Statement, and these can be stored in separate
named StatementIndexes. The Graph object has an attribute
'statement_index_h', a hash with the StatementIndex names as keys and
the index objects as values, i.e.
has 'statement_index_h' => ( is=>'rw', isa=>'HashRef[StatementIndex]',
default=>{...});
The StatementIndexes can be accessed using $graph-
>get_index_by_name($name).
The StatementIndexes themselves have methods such as
'statements' (getter/setter), 'add_statement', 'remove_statement',
'clear_all_statements', and various others.
Most instantiations of the Graph object will have four specific sets
of statements to be grouped together, so these four StatementIndex
objects are created by default; other indexes can be added if
required. These four sets are used frequently enough that they have
their own methods to access them, which mirror the methods provided by
the StatementIndex object; for example, one StatementIndex is called
'edges', and to manipulate it, you use methods such as $graph->edges,
$graph->add_edge, $graph->clear_all_edges, etc.. Analogous methods
would be available for the three other default StatementIndex objects.
At the moment, for a method like $graph->add_edge, the method does
$graph->get_index_by_name('edge') to get the index, followed by $index-
>add_statement. I thus have a whole load of very short subs to
implement the desired methods. I'm sure there must be a better way of
doing it than this... I thought that I could do something involving
delegation, but I couldn't get my implementation to work (not sure if
that was just my code, tho). Another thought was to use a method
modifier that would parse the name of the subroutine (using
Sub::Identify), extract the name of the index to fetch, and then call
the appropriate 'xxx_statements' on the fetched index.
Can anyone suggest a good way to do this? I feel there should be an
easy way to do this kind of thing!
Thank you in advance for any help... it's much appreciated!
Amelia.
