AS3/Flex Decorator Pattern - apache-flex

I'm trying to create a decorator class in AS3/Flex in order to add some functionality to a UI element. The problem is that I don't know how to automatically "redirect" method and property calls to the object being decorated. I suppose I'm looking for something like the __call() "magic method" from PHP, which is called every time the application calls a non-callable method.
So, the question is - how do I redirect calls for methods and properties (which aren't overriden/don't exist in the decorator class) to the object being decorated?

I think the closest to magic methods in actionscript would be extending Proxy.

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Show nested usages in IntelliJ IDEA

In IntelliJ IDEA, is there a way to see usages of a method nested in other usages?
I have a symfony2 app that has a class MyClass with method myMethod() this method is used in a bunch of services and controllers. I would like to trace all usages of this method all the way up to controllers that are linked to the app's routes. As a result, I would have a list of routes and corresponding controllers/methods that directly or indirectly use myMethod(). Is it possible?
In Java, it's Cmd-Alt-H (Ctrl-Alt-H on Windows), so I assume it's the same in PHP.
It's called "Call hierarchy". So you can use Cmd-shift-A (resp. Ctrl-shift-A and type "Call hierarchy" to find it.

OCMock 3 Partial Mock: Class methods and the objc runtime

I'm running into an interesting issue when using OCMock 3 when partially mocking an object that defines class methods. I'm not sure if this is an issue with the dynamic subclassing that takes part as partial mocking or my misunderstanding of the objc runtime. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
As part of running tests and other debug builds we do some runtime verification of method declarations using OmniFoundations' OBRuntimeCheck. One of these checks, in short, attempts to use the runtime to verify that type signatures match for class methods across inheritance and protocol conformance. This happens by listing the classes registered in the runtime and for each class the instance methods of the metaClass are copied. For each Method from the metaClass if it exists on the metaClass's superclass the type signatures are compared.
The problem comes when calling class_getInstanceMethod on the metaClass's superclass for one of the ocmock replacement selectors, ocmock_replaced_*. The test crashes EXC_BAD_INSTRUCTION code=EXC_i386_INVOP subcode=0x0 and no class for metaclass is logged in the console. Example given:
class_getInstanceMethod(metaSuperClass, NSSelectorFromString(#"ocmock_replaced_classMessage"))
When partial mocking an object that defines a class method, it appears that the OCMock 3 framework generates a dynamic subclass, does some isa swizzling of the mocked object and also some isa swizzling of the dynamically generated class' metaClass.
This behavior and crash is new in OCMock 3 and I'm really at a loss of where to look next. Any runtime gurus have any idea what may be going on here? When looking through the code it did surprise me that the dynamically generated class used for the mock was having it's meta class swizzled out, but I don't necessarily think that is wrong. For ease in debugging I have created a simplified test case in a fresh fork of OCMock. The crashing test can be found here. Any help for guidance would be greatly appreciated.
I may be way off here, but I thought the superclass of a metaClass is NSObject (which is why you can normally call NSObject instance methods on class objects). I'm not sure you should be doing anything, normally, with the superclass of a metaClass.
In general, the metaClass stores all of the information about class methods. Therefore, getting an "instance" method on a metaClass is the same as getting a class method on the associated regular Class. The runtime can simply dereference the "isa" pointer of an instance to find a method list to find instance methods; doing the same on a Class object gets the meta class (of the same structure) and therefore the same process results in finding the class methods.
OCMock will create a magic subclass for any partial mock, and change the class on that instance to the new subclass, so all the instance method swizzling will be specific to that instance. For class methods though, I thought it had to modify the original class itself -- otherwise, calls to the regular class method in regular code would not be intercepted. It keeps a copy of the original implementation so that when you call -stopMocking on the mock it can restore the original implementation (the added ocmock_replaced* impl will still be there but should no longer be called).
You could simply ignore any selector which starts with "ocmock_replaced" since that really is not related to your actual code you are presumably checking. You might also have better luck changing "class_getInstanceMethod(metaSuperClass, ..." to "class_getClassMethod(regularSuperClass, ..."). I'm not sure why you would be getting a crash though -- I would expect class_getInstanceMethod(metaSuperClass, ...) to just return NULL in most situations.

Should I use a singleton class that inherits from an instantiable class or there's another better pattern?

I've got a class called ArtificialIntelligenceBase from which you can create your own artificial intelligence configuration sending some variables to the constructor or you can make a class that inherits from ArtificialIntelligenceBase and in the constructor of this new class just call the function super() with the parameters of the configurations.
I've also created some examples of artificial intelligences in classes, AIPassive, AIAgressive and AIDefensive. Obviously all of them inherits from ArtificialIntelligenceBase.
The point is that there're only few public functions in the base class. The variables in the base class are read only and the non public functions are protected in case you need to apply some modifications on them when created another pre-defined AI.
You can also create another AI just calling the base class sending some parameters in the constructor like this: new ArtificialIntelligenceBase(param1, param2, param3, param4);
I've tought about make the classes as a singleton because the classes can never change and once setted, their variables never change.
The question is: Is the singleton the best pattern to do this? Because I'm not sure.
PD: You don't need to explain any patter, just mention the name and I'll search for how it works
PPD: I'm developing in AS3. Just in case it helps
Thanks
In general, singletons are evil. I don't see any reason in your case to use a singleton, either. It sounds like you're using your own version of a factory method pattern (using a constructor somehow?) or maybe a prototype (I don't know AS3 one bit), but if you're looking for other patterns a couple of other ones are abstract factory and builder.
You don't need to use the singleton pattern to limit yourself to using only one instance per type of class, though. It doesn't help avoid redundancy.

Asp.net MVC RouteBase and IoC

I am creating a custom route by subclassing RouteBase. I have a dependency in there that I'd like to wire up with IoC. The method GetRouteData just takes HttpContext, but I want to add in my unit of work as well....somehow.
I am using StructureMap, but info on how you would do this with any IoC framework would be helpful.
Well, here is our solution. Many little details may be omitted but overall idea is here. This answer may be a kind of offtop to original question but it describes the general solution to the problem.
I'll try to explain the part that is responsible for plain custom HTML-pages that are created by users at runtime and therefore can't have their own Controller/Action. So the routes should be either somehow built at runtime or be "catch-all" with custom IRouteConstraint.
First of all, lets state some facts and requirements.
We have some data and some metadata about our pages stored in DB;
We don't want to generate a (hypothetically) whole million of routes for all of existing pages beforehand (i.e. on Application startup) because something can change during application and we don't want to tackle with pushing the changes to global RouteCollection;
So we do it this way:
1. PageController
Yes, special controller that is responsible for all our content pages. And there is the only action that is Display(int id) (actually we have a special ViewModel as param but I used an int id for simplicity.
The page with all its data is resolved by ID inside that Display() method. The method itself returns either ViewResult (strongly typed after PageViewModel) or NotFoundResult in case when page is not found.
2. Custom IRouteConstraint
We have to somewhere define if the URL user actually requested refers to one of our custom pages. For this we have a special IsPageConstraint that implements IRouteConstraint interface. In the Match() method of our constraint we just call our PageRepository to check whether there is a page that match our requested URL. We have our PageRepository injected by StructureMap. If we find the page then we add that "id" parameter (with the value) to the RouteData dictionary and it is automatically bound to PageController.Display(int id) by DefaultModelBinder.
But we need a RouteData parameter to check. Where we get that? Here comes...
3. Route mapping with "catch-all" parameter
Important note: this route is defined in the very end of route mappings list because it is very general, not specific. We check all our explicitly defined routes first and then check for a Page (that is easily changeable if needed).
We simply map our route like this:
routes.MapRoute("ContentPages",
"{*pagePath}",
new { controller = "Page", action = "Display" }
new { pagePath = new DependencyRouteConstraint<IsPageConstraint>() });
Stop! What is that DependencyRouteConstraint thing appeared in mapping? Well, thats what does the trick.
4. DependencyRouteConstraint<TConstraint> class
This is just another generic implementation of IRouteConstraint which takes the "real" IRouteConstraint (IsPageConstraint) and resolves it (the given TConstraint) only when Match() method called. It uses dependency injection so our IsPageConstraint instance has all actual dependencies injected!
Our DependencyRouteConstraint then just calls the dependentConstraint.Match() providing all the parameters thus just delegating actual "matching" to the "real" IRouteConstraint.
Note: this class actually has the dependency on ServiceLocator.
Summary
That way we have:
Our Route clear and clean;
The only class that has a dependency on Service Locator is DependencyRouteConstraint;
Any custom IRouteConstraint uses dependency injection whenever needed;
???
PROFIT!
Hope this helps.
So, the problem is:
Route must be defined beforehand, during Application startup
Route's responsibility is to map the incoming URL pattern to the right Controller/Action to perform some task on request. And visa versa - to generate links using that mapping data. Period. Everything else is "Single Responsibility Principle" violation which actually led to your problem.
But UoW dependencies (like NHibernate ISession, or EF ObjectContext) must be resolved at runtime.
And that is why I don't see the children of RouteBase class as a good place for some DB work dependency. It makes everything closely coupled and non-scalable. It is actually impossible to perform Dependency Injection.
From now (I guess there is some kind of already working system) you actually have just one more or less viable option that is:
To use Service Locator pattern: resolve your UoW instance right inside the GetRouteData method (use CommonServiceLocator backed by StructureMap IContainer). That is simple but not really nice thing because this way you get the dependency on static Service Locator itself in your Route.
With CSL you have to just call inside GetRouteData:
var uow = ServiceLocator.Current.GetService<IUnitOfWork>();
or with just StructureMap (without CSL facade):
var uow = ObjectFactory.GetInstance<IUnitOfWork>();
and you're done. Quick and dirty. And the keyword is "dirty" actually :)
Sure, there is much more flexible solution but it needs a few architectural changes. If you provide more details on exactly what data you get in your routes I can try to explain how we solved our Pages routing problem (using DI and custom IRouteConstraint).

Calling a getter without assigning it to anything (lazy loading)

I have a DTO which can be fully loaded or lazy loaded using Lazy Load Pattern. How it is loaded depends on what the Flex Application needs. However, this DTO will be sent to a Flex application (swf). Normally, a collection for instance, will only be loaded when called. In my case however, the collection will only be called in Flex, so my implementation on the .NET side will obviously not work in this case (except if Flex would do a server call... something I would like to avoid).
In the getter of the collection, the data is retrieved from the database. If I would be working with ASP.NET pages, it would work, but not if the DTO is sent to Flex.
How would you deal with this? I could call the getter before sending the DTO to Flex, but that seems awful... + calling the getter can only be done if it is assigned to something (and the local variable that will hold the collection will never be used...).
You can introduce a method to load dependents - loadDependencies - that should take of all lazy loading for your DTO object before being sent over the wire (to Flex). You can abstract this method to an interface to streamline such process across different DTOs. There is nothing against using getters the way you described it inside this method.
I would probably introduce a Finalize method for the class and perhaps a FinalizeAll extension method for various collections of the class. This method would simply go through and reference all the getters on the public properties of the class to ensure that they are loaded. You would invoke Finalize (or FinalizeAll) before sending the object(s) to your Flex app. You might even want to make this an interface so that you can test for the need for finalization before transfering your objects and invoke the method based on a test for the interface rather than checking for each class individually.
NOTE: Finalize is just the first name that popped into mind. There may be (probably is) a better name for this.

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