Re: Bag IDL

[Michael Meeks <michael ximian com>]

Hi Mike,

On Mon, 19 Feb 2001, Mike Kestner wrote:
> > We have added this to make it more obvious that a PropertyBag is  
> > also an EventSource. Please do not remove it.  
> 
> If your intentions are to document the availability of signals/events,
> this falls well short.

        Perhaps, but it is an improvement on nothing. Furthermore, it
makes life easier for scripters - using your own argument below, instead  
of typing in long strings to a QI method, we just type
getEventSource().addListener (...)

> The user is still forced to drill through the code to determine what
> types of events are produced and what nebulous string name must be 
> parsed out of the event source's generic event production voodoo.  

        AFAIR we encode event names with a path, type and subtype field   
that ensures that multiple interfaces can be aggregated to a single event
source and have no event name conflicts - the path being the IDL path, the
type and subtype being interface specific. eg. title:changed.

> Instead of adding methods to document queryable interfaces, perhaps
> adding comments on the related interface's usage would be better.
  
        The XInterface stuff is needed a-la OO.

> The old PropertyListener interface provided a well defined API for the
> types and format of events produced by a bag.  
  
        I forget how this worked, however, the critque of Any's complexity
either applied equaly to it - or it required unneccessary round trips I   
forget.

        Either way, the complexity of Any's is more percieved than real,  
and is no worse than eg. gnumeric's Value structure. and not more 
complicated than neccessary [ except for union ].

	I believe the decision to go with a standard event source /
listener was the correct one.
 
        Regards,
 
                Michael.

-- 
 mmeeks gnu org  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot