Reworking the spaghetti

Bear with me as I affectedly ignore the fact that two posts on consecutive days constitutes a supernal feat not reached by this blog in almost a year.

Today's coding progress mainly comprises alterations to the ObjectManager class, which is responsible for holding a group of objects and sending them redraw commands and events, and returning to its parent such information as whether or not the mouse is hovering over one of its subordinate objects. As is by now ExeSoft tradition, bugfixes and feature modifications had by this afternoon driven the former beauty of the HandleEvent() function deep into the seething droves of, ahem, faecal matter, which are to be found in the realms of spaghetti-like entanglement and fractallic code-nesting.

And so, driven by the view that CurveDraw's sequel shouldn't face hereditary messiness, I spent some time re-working the code in an attempt to make it legible. And a success it was, for to my eyes at least the code now seems a lot less mucky. It's still verging on a hundred lines for the one function, but that should change as I break some of its tasks up into sub-functions (and perhaps further simplify what it's doing).

However, it's not all invisible behind-the-semi-functional-scenes stuff in this instalment; I also added a new feature. Behold the glorious power of object re-ordering:



This solves an irritating problem frequently encountered when multiple filled shapes conglomerate in an image: now, you needn't bother carefully regulating the order in which you add objects to the scene so as to keep the background at the back, because with a single tap/hammer/rocket-propelled incineration of the arrow keys you can deftly alter the ordering of any objects in the drawing. This is done with a bit of fiddly pointer-juggling - you can see this part of the code here.

For now, I depart, leaving only the (by now dubious) promise of another post in the near future. Although many will be inclined to incredulity, I assure you that unless major difficulties are encountered, this blog should now continue as it once did (before the recurring failures to update). If I don't post again within a week or so, do feel free to provide a text-based kick via the comments section.

As before, the source code for the entire project is available at exesoft.awardspace.co.uk.