Re: [anjuta-devel] Change project property interface

[Abderrahim Kitouni <a kitouni gmail com>]

Hello Sébastien,

> I remember that we have discussed about improving the project properties 
> API.
>
> So here is a new proposal. We define the following

Thanks for taking the time to think about this, I think it's going in
the right direction, but I'd rather push it further. See below for my
remarks.

> struct _AnjutaProjectProperty
> {
>       gchar *value;
>       gchar *name;
>       AnjutaProjectPropertyInfo *info;
> }

Does the name really need to be here (rather than in the info)?

 
> struct _AnjutaProjectNode
> {
>       GInitiallyUnowned parent_instance;
>
>       /*< private >*/
>       AnjutaProjectNode       *next;
>       AnjutaProjectNode *prev;
>       AnjutaProjectNode       *parent;
>       AnjutaProjectNode *children;

Are the following also considered private? If not, there should be a /*< public >*/
here.
        
>       AnjutaProjectNodeType type;
>       AnjutaProjectNodeState state;
>
>       GList *properties_info;
>       GList *properties;

Since the memory management of these two lists are done by subclasses,
I'd rather replace them with virtual methods.


> The id parameter of the property info uses GLib g_intern_string 
> function, so we don't need to use string comparison.

I'm afraid this won't work with introspection. If we really need fast
comparison, we should use GQuark instead, but that's probably not worth
the trouble.


> struct _AnjutaProjectPropertyInfo
> {
>       AnjutaProjectProperty base;
>       const gchar *id;
>       AnjutaProjectValueType type;
>       AnjutaProjectPropertyFlags flags;
>       const gchar *description;
> }

> As a property info include some default value it can be handle as a 
> property.

The problem with this is that introspection doesn't really like ad-hoc
subclassing; we can probably get it to work, but I'd rather find
something else. In what cases it might be interesting to use a
PropertyInfo as a Property?

 
> Backend could derive their own property and property info type to add 
> more information.
>
> Properties are set using ianjuta_project_set_property and deleted using 
> ianjuta_project_remove_property so the backend can handle the memory 
> allocation as needed. But the properties should provide the structure 
> defined so they can read in a general way.

Another change I'd like is to have IAnjutaProject's methods dealing with
properties take the property id instead of a pointer to the property.


Thanks and regards,
Abderrahim