Martins Design Study

Overview

My design study is about the reporting interface for my group (Team Patchwork's) Eclipse plugin which we designed last year. I wrote the reporting interface myself, but without using good OO design. Although it worked, it is a little bothersome to extend (I.E. to create new types of reports or new views an layouts. Hence, I decided to analyze and improve it somewhat.

Use Cases

The reporting interface would be used as follows:

• The user should be able to generate a report for any date range.
• The user should be able to generate a report for any metric defined by the plugin.
• The user should be able to edit an existing report, by changing the date range. The report display should update to reflect the new date range.
• The user should be able to add or remove metrics from an existing report. The report display should update to reflect the new date range.
• The user should be able to save a report as some sort of file (XML, CSV, anything will do, really).

Initial Design

A diagram of the initial design of the reporting interface is shown below.

Flaws

The flaws in the initial design include the following:

• ActivityCategory is not linked to the report.
• The ActivityReportWizard class does not allow the containing of sub-forms. It is all packed into one huge form. This is inconvenient - it would be good to allow a wizard with multiple forms. It does allow for one page, but not many.
• The ActivityReportWizard class and ActivityReportWizardPage class both contain the ActivityReport object, making changes to it. This does not smell right!
• ActivityCategory is unused! This class is supposed to dictate which metrics appear in the report.
• ActivityCategory should perhaps be either a Composite or a Decorator. It is neither at the moment.
• There is no way to export to XML or any other file format. A new class should be introduced for this.

Improved Design

A diagram of the improved design of the reporting interface is shown below.

TODO.

Patterns Used

In the improved version, I used the following design patterns:

TODO.

Discussion

The design project was to improve the reporting interface for the "Team Patchwork Reporting Application". TODO.