Visual Basic —

Determining the Parameters of a Factory

Because we don't use explicit procedure parameters in the Populate method of the factory class, it can be useful to be able to determine what these parameters are. The read-only Parameters property returns a cParams object populated with the valid parameter names for this factory.

The Parameters property is useful when designing tools that interact with business objects-such as the business object browser that we'll look at later on-since the parameters for a factory can be determined at run time. This determination allows us to automatically instantiate factory objects.

Dim ocfEmployees        As New cfEmployees
  Dim ocParams            As New cParams
  Set ocfEmployees = New cfEmployees
  Set ocParams = ocfEmployee.Parameters
  ' Do stuff with ocParams.

Worker Objects

So far, we've concentrated mainly on the factory objects; now it's time to examine in greater detail the construction of the worker objects.

Factory objects all have the same interface. Worker objects all have unique interfaces. The interface of our sample Employee worker object is shown below.

cWorker Employee Interface

Member Description
ID Unique string identifier for the worker object
Name Employee name
Salary Employee gross salary
Department Department the employee works in
Create Creates a new worker object

Creating a worker

As we saw in the discussion of the factory object, creating a worker object involves passing the worker object a reference to the shared recordset and a reference to the factory's DAL object. This is what the worker does with these parameters:

Private oPicRecordset      As cRecordSet
  Private lPiRowIndex        As Long
  Private oPicDAL            As cDAL
  Friend Sub Create(i_ocRecordset As cRecordSet, i_ocDAL As cDAL)
      Set oPicRecordset = i_ocRecordset
      Set oPicDAL = i_ocDAL
      lPiRowIndex = I_ocRecordset.AbsolutePosition
  End Sub

Why is this procedure so friendly? (That is, why is it declared as Friend and not as Public?) Well, remember that these worker objects are "Public Not Creatable" because we want them instantiated only by the factory object. Because the factory and workers always live in the same component, the Friend designation gives the factory object exclusive access to the Create method. Notice also that the worker objects store the row reference in the module-level variable lPiRowIndex.