Comments on: DataProvider Metamorphisis: A Parasite That’s Straight Jacked

By: Erik Bianchi

Erik Bianchi — Sat, 25 Oct 2003 00:00:07 +0000

It’s a decorator according to the Dataprovider.as comments however a decorator must conform to the interface of the object it is decorating (See GOF Design Patterns Page 179 Implementation). In this case it does not. It is adding public methods to every instance of an existing class. You should never touch a class that doesn?t belong to you.

I?d much rather use an instance of the dataProvider class then have my array (err all my arrays) magically turn into one.

I like the concept but not the implementation.

By: JesterXL

JesterXL — Fri, 24 Oct 2003 21:26:37 +0000

Actually, the issue really was the docs didn’t seem to make this clear. This was partially due to me using DataProvider in the past as it’s own class, not just an interface/API type deal, so that added to confusion of understanding that I should use an Array, but just “trust” that it’ll really be a DataProvider.

By: JesterXL

JesterXL — Fri, 24 Oct 2003 21:24:52 +0000

Well, keep in mind I’m still learning.

I think Erik’s worries where that since your doing the prototype, although this is efficient, your now empowering all Array’s with this ability. What he keeps touting to me is that prototype is dead (for good practice anyway), and your supposed to be rolling your own class that extends another one.

This seems to spit in the face of that, so I guess if DataProvider extended Array instead of messing with the prototype, that’d be cool.

I do like, however, how I can just an array; that’s pretty conveinant for a dataprovider.

By: nig

nig — Fri, 24 Oct 2003 21:00:48 +0000

I’m not as down with the street as I once was, but was this a positive post or negative? Anything we could be doing better?