Examples of edu.mit.blocks.workspace.FactoryManager

• edu.mit.blocks.workspace.FactoryManager
  ***********************OVERVIEW The FactoryManager manages all block factories in the workspace. It has three main functions: to control and display all factories in one simple UI design, to manage the additions of new drawers, and to add blocks to throse drawers appropriately. The FactoryManager manages two factories: the static factory and dynamic factory. Each factory has a set of drawers. NO TWO DRAWERS WITHIN ANY FACTORY MAY SHARE the same name. ********************FACTORY STRUCTURE Let's take a look into the stucture of a factory. Factory is a pallete that sits on the far left side of the workspace. It has a bunch of drawers that slides up and down. Each drawer contains a bunch of related blocks that can be dragged out. The FactoryManager has two types of drawers: static and dynamic. To add, remove, rename, drawers of either type, users should invoke the name that specifies a particular drawer. Users may also add blocks to the drawers or retrieve the set of blocks that each drawer holds. *************IMPLEMENTATION DETAIL How the FactoryManager implements this UI is implementation dependant. Right now, it uses the Navigator-Explorer-Canvas deisgn. Clients of the FactoryManager should know nothing about the internal GUIs used to control the interface. Internally, a Canvas (rahter than an instance of Drawer) is created for every "drawer" that the user wishes to add. But this is an implementation detail that the user should not be bothered with. All the user should know is that a "drawer" specified by some String object was created. The handling of the drawers themselves are dealt with internally. In a previous design of the factories, developers had to create instance of Drawers and pass them along to the the factories. In the NEW design, we remove that burden from the developer and allow the developer to access drawers by calling its name only. This may limit extensibility but keeps the system more robust. *********************A WORD ON DRAWER Please note that the word "drawer" as it is used by the FactoryManager refers to the object that holds blocks. A factory holds a bunch of drawers, which in turn holds a bunch of blocks. Please do not mix this definition with the CSwing Drawer class. A CSwing Drawer is a low-level component that is used in a CSwing Exlorer. Here, when the documentation refers to drawers, it is NOT refering to the CSwing Drawer. Rather, when we say "drawer", we are referign to that object that holds blocks. *****************NAMING OF DRAWERS Each factory may have only ONE drawer with a particular name. Two different factories may NOT share a name. If we have a static drawer named "FOO", we may not have another drawer named "FOO" in the dynamic drawers. @author An Ho

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