Re: Yet another OO question...

ChrisW wrote:


<snippage>

I think I agree with Oliver. The problem has been decomposed enough
that additional objects don't seem to be very useful. Nevertheless,
I'll make a few comments.

First, rather than one big long main method, it might be nice if you
broke the design up a little, perhaps into a simple
input-processing-output model, using methods instead of functions.

(Let's see if I can do this without invoking Lew to comment on my style
or syntax :))

class MyProg {

    private void readFile() {...}
    private void processData() {...}
    private void printTable() {...}
}

You can then have the main method call each of these as appropriate.
There might be even more ways to break each method up into a few smaller
methods each.

Second, it might be nice if you actually added some instance variables,
and designed MyProg to be instatiated. Let's rename it
ExcelTableProcessor and go from there:

class ExcelTableProcessor {

    String fileName;
    // etc.

    public ExcelTableProcessor( String file_name )
    {
        this.fileName = file_name;
    }

    public doIt
    {
        readFile();
        processData();
        printTable();
    }

    public static void main ( String args[] )
    {
        ExcelTableProcessor x =
            new ExcelTableProcessor(args[0]);
        x.doIt()
    }
    private void readFile() {...}
    private void processData() {...}
    private void printTable() {...}
}

This to me shows a bit more structure than one 300 line blob in a single
method.

Lastly, give some thought to testing. Maybe look at JUnit, or design
you own test. Just thinking about it, testing and reading from a file
might be hard, so maybe this needs to be refactored to take an input
stream and an output stream, and that'll help testing a bit.

Oh, and Java contains some tags to help with documentation, check into
that too.

Overall, this is not really OO though, just basic design.

Just my 2 nickels.