On 19-Oct-05, at 5:39 PM, Janice Cheung wrote:
Hi David! :)
Thank you for your advice. I'll start again.
OK,
My head hurts.
I wrote out a great long-winded email about flattened attributes and
relationships an setter and getter method names. But I think I need
to stop now.
This is what I think you are trying to do. You are trying to take
arrays of objects and reduce their values to comma separated strings
for some reason. Why? I don't know.
Chuck identified the problem with your setter method when he said this:
Are you sure you read this? You pass in a parameter named value,
don't use it, then assign the value that you want to replace to it.
Any anyway, this makes no sense. emailContactNames is a calculated
value. You can't set it. Even if value is a string of email
addresses, which belongs on which ServerContact?
I'm baffled too. Not only do I not know what you are doing wrong,
I don't even know what you think you are doing. Time to start again.
So. Here is some thoughts:
You are writing too much code. Learn NSDictionary, NSArray, and NSSet
you'll be glad you did.
I don't know, but get the idea you may be mutating values in your EO
attribute accessors, don't do that. Write cover methods instead. If
it is for presentation purposes don't put that in your EOs at all. It
doesn't belong there.
If you are receiving an array of objects and you need to display
their values separated by commas then use a WORepetition and have it
build the presentation for you. That's what it's there for (and you
write no code).
If you *really* need to have a comma separated string of your values
for some other reason and you need that to happen in multiple places,
write generic methods to do that.
Chuck's reply supplied an elegant way to do that. From it I got:
public String stringFromArray(NSArray array){
NSSet aSet = new NSSet(array);
return aSet.allObjects().componentsJoinedWithString(",");
}
If you need to accept comma separated strings of your values to go
back to your database again (yuck, think really hard about why you
need this) you will need to write a method to turn the string back
into an array before moving forward.
Take a look at: NSArray.componentsSeparatedByString(String
components, String separator)
public NSArray arrayFromString(String value) {
return NSArray.componentsSeparatedByString(value, ",");
}
But!
I think this is a really lousy idea. For you to be able to go from a
string back to your array of serverContracts (and then to their
contact.fullNames) you will need to guarantee that the order of the
serverContracts array has not changed. I cannot do that, can you?
Really. You should try to keep objects as objects for as long as
possible, when you reduce them to something flat you lose their
identity and then it become really hard to return.
--
;david
--
David LeBer
"I am codeferous!"
Codeferous Software
site: http://www.codeferous.com
blog: http://david.codeferous.com
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