Inside Macintosh: Programmer's Guide to MacApp / Part 2 - Working With MacApp

Appendix B - Organization of the MacApp
Class Library

This appendix provides diagrams showing the class hierarchy for key
MacApp classes.

For a comprehensive listing of MacApp's classes, see the MacApp Class and Method Reference or examine MacApp's source code with a source code browser.

Figure B-1 shows commonly used MacApp classes that descend from TObject, including TEvent, TCommand, TEventHandler, and TCommandHandler. TObject is the base class for most MacApp classes. It contains fields and methods that provide services required by most objects. The TObject class is described in detail in Chapter 2, "Basic Operations."

The TEvent class provides fields and methods for working with events received from the operating system. The TCommand subclass supports command operations that can be done, undone, and redone. The TEventHandler class and its subclass TCommandHandler provide fields and methods for classes that know how to create command objects to respond to events. All of these classes are described in detail in Chapter 5, "Events and Commands."

MScriptableObject is a mixin class that provides facilities for working with scripts and responding to Apple events. MacApp's scripting support is described in Chapter 6, "Scripting."

MacApp's command, document, view, and application classes are shown in subsequent illustrations.

Figure B-1 Top-level classes

MacApp supplies a number of command classes (Figure B-2), both to provide services and to serve as superclasses for commands you define.

Figure B-2 Command classes

Figure B-3 shows MacApp's document classes.

MacApp provides the TFileBasedDocument class for working with disk files, the TMailableDocument class to provide support for PowerTalk mailers, and the TEditionDocument class to support publish and subscribe. The TTEDocument class, from the DemoText sample application, demonstrates many text-editing features, as well as the use of drag and drop and PowerTalk mailers. You can read about MacApp's document classes in Chapter 7, "Document Handling."

Figure B-3 Document classes

MacApp provides many view classes for displaying data and receiving user input. You can read about them in Chapter 8, "Displaying, Manipulating, and Printing Data." Figure B-4 shows these view classes.

Figure B-4 View classes

MacApp's control view classes (Figure B-5) implement many standard user interface items, including buttons, checkboxes, and scroll bars. You can also define subclasses of these classes for your custom controls. For more information see Chapter 8, "Displaying, Manipulating, and Printing Data."

Figure B-5 Control view classes

There is one global application object in each MacApp application. The application object serves many purposes, including receiving and dispatching most events from the operating system. TVUApplication is an abstract class that provides Virtual User support for automated testing. TApplication provides the bulk of application operations, while TMailingApplication adds support for PowerTalk mailers. Figure B-6 shows MacApp's application classes.

Figure B-6 Application classes

Figure B-7 shows many additional classes that descend from TObject. These classes are described in various places throughout this book.

Figure B-7 Other classes

MacApp provides a number of C++ utility classes to perform operations such as object comparison, string processing, and manipulation of data types including points, rectangles, drag-and-drop flavor flags, Apple event descriptors, and RGB colors. A sampling of these classes is shown in Figure B-8.

Figure B-8 C++ utility classes