OO Thinking - First Attempt at building an object

Objective: store sales & units sold information by vendor, by year, by
month, by class code.

In my nested data structured brain i see it like this

hash{vendor}{year}{month}[0…5][0…1]

0…5 = represent 6 different item classification codes
0…1 = represents qty, sales.

I keep trying to write the pseudo code for an object and keep ending up
with
1 attribute that is the above data structure. Which kind of defeats the
purpose.

Maybe a nested data structure is really the way to go with this?
Or an object for each (vendor,year,month) that just increments or
decrements
the values. So my attribute would just
be array_class[0…5][0…1].

Still seems messy and overcomplicated.

Thoughts?

Please don’t write the class just help me sketch this out. My brain just
is
not use to the whole OO thing :slight_smile:

Paul

On May 31, 2006, at 11:55 AM, Paul D. Kraus wrote:

I keep trying to write the pseudo code for an object and keep

Still seems messy and overcomplicated.

Thoughts?

Please don’t write the class just help me sketch this out. My brain
just is
not use to the whole OO thing :slight_smile:

Paul

I usually try to build OO systems that parallel the actual items or
events in a system. So for something like this, I’d first make an
“Item” class which would contain vitals about a specific unit
(vendor, model, etc…) There could be many of these objects (one
for each unit) or not so many (one for each type of unit, though
“ItemType” might be a better name then)

Then another class called something like “SalesRecord” which would
contain the time and date of the sale, and an identifier (id, index,
mac address) for which unit was sold.

If you want to look this all up, I recommend using ActiveRecord and
tying all this to a database (SalesRecord has an item). Then you can
look up by anything.

But there’s always more than one way to skin a cat.
-Mat

On May 31, 2006, at 10:55 AM, Paul D. Kraus wrote:

I keep trying to write the pseudo code for an object and keep

Still seems messy and overcomplicated.

Thoughts?

Please don’t write the class just help me sketch this out. My brain
just is
not use to the whole OO thing :slight_smile:

Classes are data, wrapped up with the behaviors for that data.
You’ve already laid out the data, so I’m just repeating you:

  • vendor
  • year
  • month
  • classification code
  • quantity
  • sales

Possible behaviors might be verifying that a classification code is
legal when it is set, for example.

Now, if you have all these objects in an Array, you can always find()
(Hint, hint!) them by any criteria you need, right?

Hope that helps.

James Edward G. II

On 5/31/06, Paul D. Kraus [email protected] wrote:

I keep trying to write the pseudo code for an object and keep ending up with
Thoughts?
There is one store
The store has many vendors
Vendors have many products
The store has many sales (of its vendors products)

hth

Please don’t write the class just help me sketch this out. My brain just is
not use to the whole OO thing :slight_smile:

That takes a lot of the fun out of replying :wink: