From: James Edward Gray II <james@...>
Date: 2006-06-01T01:23:40+09:00
Subject: Re: OO Thinking - First Attempt at building an object

On May 31, 2006, at 10:55 AM, Paul D. Kraus wrote:

> Objective: store sales & units sold information by vendor, by year, by
> month,  by class code.
>
> In my nested data structured brain i see it like this
>
> hash{vendor}{year}{month}[0..5][0..1]
>
> 0..5 = represent 6 different item classification codes
> 0..1 = represents qty, sales.
>
> I keep trying to write the pseudo code for an object and keep  
> ending up with
> 1 attribute that is the above data structure. Which kind of defeats  
> the
> purpose.
>
> Maybe a nested data structure is really the way to go with this?
> Or an object for each (vendor,year,month) that just increments or  
> decrements
> the values. So my attribute would just
> be array_class[0..5][0..1].
>
> Still seems messy and overcomplicated.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> Please don't write the class just help me sketch this out. My brain  
> just is
> not use to the whole OO thing :)

Classes are data, wrapped up with the behaviors for that data.   
You've already laid out the data, so I'm just repeating you:

* vendor
* year
* month
* classification code
* quantity
* sales

Possible behaviors might be verifying that a classification code is  
legal when it is set, for example.

Now, if you have all these objects in an Array, you can always find()  
(Hint, hint!) them by any criteria you need, right?

Hope that helps.

James Edward Gray II