[Seaside] newbie design question

[Avi Bryant]

On Jul 3, 2005, at 2:26 PM, Jamie Ashford wrote:

> Nearly....
>
> The difficulty is more to do with how these three sub-components
> should communicate with each other.
>
> In my task subclass I had code like this:
>
> result := call Comp1 new.
>
> result2 := call Comp2 new with: result.
>
> result3 := call Comp3 new with: result2.
>
> I can render all three components onto a single page, as you suggest,
> but I am not sure how I should pass information between them...

A few options:

The three components could be explicitly aware of each other: so,  
Comp1 would have a reference to Comp2, and Comp2 would have a  
reference to Comp3.  You could set this all up in the #initialize  
method of the component creating the three of them.  Actually, what  
I've described might be backwards: I tend to prefer a "pull" model to  
"push", and so would probably structure things so that Comp3 knew  
about Comp2 and Comp2 knew about Comp1, and each one polled the  
previous component on every render to know what the status was.

However, that probably results in too much dependency between the  
components.  Another option, similar to what you were trying with  
call/answer with the Task, would be to use the #onAnswer: blocks of  
the components to pass information around.  When you're embedding a  
component rather than calling it, that's what's called when you use  
#answer:.  So, it might look something like this:

initialize
     comp1 := Comp1 new onAnswer: [:val | comp2 with: val].
     comp2 := Comp2 new onAnswer: [:val | comp3 with: val].
     comp3 := Comp3 new.

Finally, I might use some kind of a domain model that included the  
list state and data inputs and whatnot for this compound page.  I  
would then have all three components share an instance of this model,  
and use it rather than private inst vars to manage their state.  Each  
of them might only know about a small part of the model, and the  
model class would take care of the interactions.

HTH,
Avi