From: Todd Burch <promos@...>
Date: 2007-07-23T08:29:58+09:00
Subject: Class Overkill?  What's practical?

I've hacked out a monolithic script to parse a 3D file and create a
custom bill of materials spreadsheet using win32ole and Microsoft Excel.
Neat stuff.  Very fast.  Lots of methods - all of them defaulting to the
Object class.

Now, I'm in the process of properly coding the program (rewriting it),
and creating classes and methods, and trying to pidgeon hole my existing
code into a structure that could be called object oriented.

I'm fretting over how many classes I actually need.  Here are the
classes I'm thinking I should have:

1) a class to represent the 3D file and methods for reading & validating
it

2) a class to represent the resultant bill of material spreadsheets (in
Excel terms a "WorkBook") that will have multiple sheets, with methods
for colorizing, setting cell attributes, etc.

3) a class to represent the Excel file that is the lookup table, or
catalog, of all items that could possibly make up a bill of materials,
with methods for opening, closing, reading the headings, and item names,
etc.

4) a class to represent the connection from Ruby to Excel that contains
the methods for calling Excel, establishing the connection to Excel,
quitting excel, etc.

5) I could have a class for all the headings in the catalog file that
keep track of the column number

6) I could have a class for all the item names in the catalog file, and
keep the row number

But, then I have sections of code that "cut" data from the catalog sheet
and "paste" it into the bill of materials sheet, and which class do I
put that method in?

I'm not making a general purpose library for distribution to John Q.
Rubyist.  It's for my use, and I will most likely create another bill of
materials script for another user in the future, and most certainly,
while the concepts might be the same, the specifics will change.  For
intance, it might use a MySQL database for the catalog data instead of
an Excel spreadheet.  Or, I might use Google Spreadsheets on the next
one instead of Excel.  Therefore, I want to structure the thing to be
reusable, but I don't want to go crazy with it.

So, I'm object-orientedly confused.  Help!

Thanks, Todd
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