Wednesday, September 24, 2014

New Status Message Class

The final lower-level class with translate functions was the token class, which contained a static function for converting a status code to an error message.  This function was moved to a new status message class as there was no other logical class to put it in.  A plain function could not be used since the easiest way to use the translate functions is to wrap them inside of a class using the Q_DECLARE_TR_FUNCTIONS() macro.

This new status message class only contains this lone static text function.  To prevent an instance of this class from being created, the default constructor was deleted using the C++11 delete feature (previous to C++11, this was accomplished by making the default constructor private).  To prevent this class from being used as a base class, the C++11 final keyword was added to the class definition:
class StatusMessage final
{
    Q_DECLARE_TR_FUNCTIONS(StatusMessage)

    StatusMessage() = delete;
public:
    static const QString text(Status status);
};
The three callers of the text function are the main window class (by the status bar update slot function), the program model class (by the debug text function used by the temporary program view widget), and the tester class (by the print error function).  Each of these were changed to use the new status message text function.

Currently no translation is loaded, so no translation occurs.  When translation gets added, the tester class should not do any translation, otherwise the expected results will not match (because they are in the default English).  Therefore, when translation does get added, if a test option is selected from the command line, no translations will be loaded.

After making these changes, two minor issues was found the table class header file.  The first was that this header was relying on the token header file to include the Qt core application header (which contains the translate functions macro), so this include was added.  The second was the argument to this macro incorrectly contained the context name Test instead of Table.  This context is used by the translate utility to identify what the translatable strings belong to.  This did not cause a compile error, but was corrected.  The table class will be redesigned to not require the translation functions (used for a few error messages).

[branch err-msgs commit 1047df7065]

This concludes the changes to use status codes throughout until an actual error message is needed.  The err-msgs branch was merged into the develop branch and deleted.  A new branch will be created for the next set of C++11 related changes, which will be the replacement of more Qt with the STL in the non-GUI classes.

[branch develop merge commit 6d5ea9367f]

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