tiOPF Concepts manual

Topics

1. What is an object persistence framework?

In this chapter we look at what an object persistence framework (OPF) is and how it can help you build better business applications. We examine some of the problems inherent in applications that are built using the RAD (rapid application design) approach that Delphi encourages, and examine how an OPF can help reduce these problems.

We take a look at the design requirements of an OPF as specified by the Jedi-Obiwan project (an open source project to build the ultimate OPF for Delphi), and Scott Ambler (a respected writer on the subject of OPFs). We will contrast these requirements with the design of the TechInsite OPF and see how the addresses (or fails to address) these requirements. Here

2. The Visitor pattern framework

So, the aim of this chapter is to come up with a generic way of performing a family of related tasks on some of the elements in a list. The task we perform may be different depending on the internal state of each element. We may not perform any tasks at all, or we may perform multiple tasks on multiple list elements. We shall use GoF’s Visitor pattern to solve this problem and will see how the Visitor can be used to save objects to a variety of text file formats. Here

3. The Visitor and SQL Databases

Most business applications use a relational database to save their data, so in this chapter we will extend he Visitor framework developed in chapter 2 to store our objects in an Interbase database. We shall extend the Visitor framework with the Template Method pattern to achieve our goal of persisting objects to a relational database. Here

4. Building an abstract business object model with the Composite pattern

In chapters two and three, we started to develop an abstract collection class, and abstract business object class and we will extend these classes in this chapter by adding more of the functionality that will be required in a complex business system. Here

5. A worked example of using the tiOPF

In this chapter we use the framework that can be downloaded as part of the tiOPF to build a real life, contact manager application. We will use UML to specify the business object model, then design a GUI using the TechInsite TPersistent aware controls. We will finish up by looking at three strategies for mapping objects to a database using the persistence manager that is part of the framework. Here

6. Using the Adaptor Pattern for database independence

The tiOPF allows you to connect to different databases, using different database APIs by simply changing a command line switch. This is achieved by wrappering the database connection components like TDatabase and TQuery, then using a factory to construct the appropriate concrete type of component. This technique is based on the Adaptor pattern and is discussed in this chapter. Here

7. References and further reading

This chapter contains the URLs for the latest copy of this document, the source code for the tiOPF, as well as the articles and papers that have been used as a basis for the tiOPF. The user group, mailing lists and tools that helped in the development of the tiOPF are also listed. Here

Source accompanying this documentation Here (613Kb)

Power Point presentation: "Rolling your own persistence framework" Here (297Kb)

Appendix 1 . Using ReportBuilder with the tiOPF

This chapter was written by Andrew Denton and outlines how to integrate ReportBuilder with the TtiListView or TtiListViewPlus. Here