Re: Renaissance and EOInterface

[Dirk Lattermann]

Hi all,

I am wondering how to use EOAssociations with Renaissance.

The designated initializer of an EOAssociation is -initWithObject:
with a display object, e.g. a text field.  Thus, an EOAssociation can't
be included in the <objects> part of the markup file (with a syntax like
<controlAssociation object="#myTextField"/>), because the implicit
outlet connector semantic won't work (no method -setObject:).

Maybe <controlAssociation object="myTextField"/> (without a hash) will
work if I access the object attribute and convert the string contents
to an object in -platformObjectInit myself, but I don't know if the
existence of myTextField is guaranteed by Renaissance according to
the order of the objects definition in the markup file.

This leaves creating the EOAssociation object for the <connectors> part.
This looks ugly to me, because to be able to set several aspects of the
association, the association object needs something like an id, too.
Another possibility would be using nested tags:

Consider this example (assuming display groups #dg1 and #dg2 are
already created somehow). Would something like this be feasible?

-----
<objects>
...
        <textField id="tfName"/>
...
</objects>

<connectors>
        <association instanceOf="controlAssociation" object="#tfName">
                <connect displayGroup="#dg1" aspect="value" key="name"/>
                <connect displayGroup="#dg2" aspect="enabled" key="boolVal"/>
        </association>
</connectors>
-----

I didn't find places where the Renaissance XML parser reads nested tags
(e.g. text fields inside windows).  So, I don't know yet if the framework
is prepared to easily handle this.

Do you have some suggestions or comments? Should I try and proceed like
in the example above?

Cheers,
Dirk Lattermann