Hi, all -

A basic OO question involving separating data from presentation:

I am trying to work out an object hierarchy for a reporting system. I am envisioning a base Report class which is subclassed into various forms of displaying the report, such as HTMLReport, PDFReport, ExcelReport, etc.

I'll have several report objects -- RevenueReport, ReceivablesReport, etc which will take parameters on creation indicating geography, time period, etc.

Here's my question: how do I tell a report (say, an instance of RevenueReport) to render as, for example, an HTMLReport? Creating all the combinations explicitly (RevenueHTMLReport, RevenueExcelReport, etc) is clear code-stink.

On the other hand, passing the render type into the report  my $report = SalesReport->new(%args, type=>'HTMLReport') and then making this SalesReport an HTMLReport by pushing 'HTMLReport' onto its ISA array seems even worse.

So I want to separate data from presentation...

so what is the correct way to tell my data object how it should present itself?

Many thanks for clarifying this for me --

rkg

In reply to OO Design -- Separating Data from Presentation by rkg

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.