Beyond 2.6

[John Ralls]

On Feb 19, 2013, at 9:39 AM, Derek Atkins <warlord at mit.edu> wrote:

> Geert Janssens <janssens-geert at telenet.be> writes:
> 
>> I don't have much experience with how this is done in general. It
>> seems to me though that's a matter of defining the API's well.
>> 
>> The GUI is supposed to know if some fields have to be
>> validated. There's no way around this. But the GUI code doesn't have
>> to know what the validation entails exactly. The core engine on the
>> other hand does know exactly what is allowed for a given object and
>> what isn't. The key is that the core engine should make some functions
>> available for testing this, returning in the most simple case a yes/no
>> reply (value is valid for object or not). In a more advanced set up it
>> can also return a message that can be displayed to the user to explain
>> why the input isn't valid.
>> 
>> These functions are part of the core engine API and don't need to use
>> any GUI framework related toolkit (like Qt, Glib, Gtk, WxWidgets
>> stuff). We could keep the signal and the slots both in the GUI code,
>> with the slots calling into the engine functions to do the real work.
>> 
>> Did I understand this correctly ?
> 
> That's how it should work, IMHO, yes.  However that's not how it
> currently works, and I suspect it might be a lot of work to convert
> GnuCash code over to that way to doing things..

"A lot of work" is a tremendous understatement. Fortunately it can be done a little at a time, as each widget stands on its own in this regard.

In my view the most important part is moving all of the business logic -- like determining if an entry is acceptable -- into the engine where it can be easily tested. View classes should be concerned exclusively with presentation and getting input; controllers should exclusively link the presentation and input to the correct engine instance, and all of the real work should happen in the engine.

There's one exception: Reports have their own logic, but it's not business logic in the sense that it doesn't affect data being stored.

Regards,
John Ralls