Programming With The Variant Manager API
For questions about this document or this project contact Thomas Seufert at seufet@users.sourceforge.net.
The Variant Manager API consists mainly of two classes in the rle.core.vm package – InfoView and InfoGroupView. These classes provide neat, read-only access to the information contained in a Variant Manager project.
The two main areas of functionality provided are searching and data retrieval. Searching refers to finding individual nodes or groups of nodes in the project; Data Retrieval refers to obtaining the values of various attributes set for a particular InfoNode.
The first step in using these API’s is to load a project to operate on.
VariantMgr vm = new VariantMgr();
DataStoreBean ds = new DataStoreBean();
ds.setName("SimpleGame");
vm.openDataStore(ds);
InfoNode node = (InfoNode)vm.getTree().getModel().getRoot();
InfoView variantRoot = new InfoView(node,this);
This code loads the project “SimpleGame” and creates a View of the “root” node, which is the path under which all project-specific information is stored. Note that the rle.core.vm.InfoView constructor requires two arguments:
1. The InfoNode to create a View of
2. The rle.core.GameContext, for use in creating PlugIns
The above code was taken from rle.simple.SimpleGame, so using “this” for the second argument passes a SimpleGame instance, which implements GameContext.
The project is located by searching in the classpath for two entries:
Note that this corresponds to exactly how the graphical Variant Manager application stores and retrieves projects on the file system.
There are two different types of nodes:
Each type of node is representing by a View class in rle.core.vm – InfoGroupView and InfoView.
Once that we have a view on the data hierarchy, we can
search for nodes within that hierarchy. Note
that all searches are NOT case sensitive.
// Obtain a view of the SimpleGame root group
VariantMgr vm = new VariantMgr();
VariantBean vb = vm.findVariant("simple-game");
vm.openVariant(vb);
InfoGroupNode node = (InfoGroupNode)vm.getCurrentData();
InfoGroupView infoRoot = new InfoGroupView(node,this);
// Find the Info Node “root/info/Player/attributes/hp”
InfoView hpAttribute = info.findInfo(“Player/attributes/hp”);
// Find the group “root/info/Player/attributes”, and list its child InfoNode’s.
InfoGroupView playerAttributeGroup = info.findInfoGroup(“Player/attributes”);
List<InfoView> playerAttributes = playerAttributeGroup.infoList();
// List the InfoNode’s contained by group “root/info/Player/attributes” in one line
List<InfoView> playerAttributes = info.findInfoGroup(“Player/attributes”).infoList();
// List the subgroups contained by “root/info”
List<InfoGroupView> mainGroups = info.infoGroupList();
// Find a View’s parent or itself. Note that these are not necessarily useful in coding, but
// does allow specification of paths from the Variant Manager relative to particular nodes.
// For instance, the Editor for dependencies in the Runtime Attribute Attribute Set relies
// on the ${parent} keyword to specify that the list of choices should be the parent
// containing the current node, rather than any particular absolute path.
InfoView hpAttribute = info.findInfo(“Player/attributes/hp”);
InfoGroupView parent = hpAttribute.findInfoGroup(“${parent}”);
InfoView self = hpAttribute.findInfo(“${self}”);
Data retrieval is done from the InfoView class. Most methods are basically for convenient, typed access to values in a Map.
// Find the node
InfoView test = info.findInfo(“test/testOne”);
// Access to integers
int testInt = test.getInt(“testNumber”);
// Access to non-translated text
String testString = test.getString(“testText”);
// Access to internationalized text in the specified language.
String translation = test.getTranslation(“testTranslation”);
// Access to an instance of a PlugIn
PlugIn provider = test.createPlugIn(“testPlugIn”);
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Revision Date |
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Thomas Seufert |
Created |
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5/30/2004 |
Thomas Seufert |
Update for 0.0.7 |
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7/8/2004 |
Thomas Seufert |
Update for 0.0.9 |
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