NAME

       ExternView,   PreorderView,   InorderView,   PostorderView   -  base  class  for  external
       representation objects and subclasses for common traversals

SYNOPSIS

       #include <Unidraw/Components/externview.h>

DESCRIPTION

       ExternView is the abstract base class  for  external  representation  objects.   Generally
       speaking,  external  representation objects convey domain-specific information outside the
       editor.  They are simply component views that extract information from their  subject  and
       externalize  it  as  a  stream  of  bytes;  thus the ExternView base class is derived from
       ComponentView.

       There  are  three  predefined  ExternView  subclasses:  PreorderView,   InorderView,   and
       PostorderView.   These  subclasses  manage subviews and support three common traversals of
       the external view hierarchy.

EXTERNVIEW PUBLIC OPERATIONS

       virtual boolean Emit(ostream&)
       virtual boolean Definition(ostream&)
              Emit and Definition make up the basic ExternView protocol.  Emit initiates external
              representation  generation  and  calls  Definition  on  each of its children.  Emit
              normally calls the external view's own Definition operation  first.   Then  if  the
              external  view contains subviews, Emit invokes the children's Definition operations
              in the proper order to ensure  a  syntactically  correct  external  representation.
              Both  of  these  operation  do  nothing  by default, and both return a boolean that
              indicates whether the stream of bytes was generated successfully.

       ExternView* GetView(Iterator)
       void SetView(ExternView*, Iterator&)
              These operations do nothing by default.  Subclasses that  contain  children  should
              redefine them as follows: GetView should return the ExternView to which an iterator
              points.  SetView should initialize the iterator to point to a particular ExternView
              in  the  list  of  children;  it  should  initialize the iterator to point to a nil
              instance if the given ExternView is not a child.

EXTERNVIEW PROTECTED OPERATIONS

       ExternView(Component* = nil)
              The abstract base class constructor is protected to  guard  against  instantiation.
              It takes the subject as an optional argument.

DERIVED CLASSES

       PreorderView,  InorderView,  and  PostorderView  redefine  their  Definition operations to
       perform preorder, inorder, and postorder traversals of their children, respectively.  Each
       child's  Definition  operation is called during the traversal.  Note that every child must
       be an instance of the same ExternView subclass to ensure a consistent traversal order.

SEE ALSO

       Component(3U), ComponentView(3U), Iterator(3U), ostream(3C++)