Using MVC design pattern

Model.

Quote:

it isn't really part of the data

It is part of data model, not data. Data is stored elsewhere.

What you have is selectable data model. A DumbView would just display the data, SelectableView would also be able to display selected elements. Same for controller.

The important distinction here is that model is not data. It is merely some functional representation of data in single place, but the data is physically stored externally in some other form. Perhaps a database or multiple files. This allows you to tack additional functionality on the model itself, while the model interface remains consistent.


Personally I've always found rigid MVC to be too artificial. It works good on paper, but ends up hackish in real world. The view:model separation does not offer ideal separation between when a view and what a model are. Selection is just one of such concepts which transcends such trivial separation, especially if more complex gestures are required as is often the case with rich interfaces. Trying to apply MVC to media rich content becomes quite challenging since some performance issues also crop up due to artificial separation which prevents more cohesive designs.

There's also this new MVVM concept which tries to address some of these shortcomings.

Thanks Antheus. My understanding of MVC seems to have been a little off, so thanks for pointing out that distinction.

MVVM seems interesting, but due to the fact I'm writing in Java I already have MVC set up in the form of Observable and Observer classes, so it's not worth looking into for this project. Thanks for pointing that out though, I hadn't heard of it before.

-SD

You can use SelectedModel model which keeps your selected model, and has its own view (eg. box to indicate selected object if it is visual view)

MVVM sounds like it takes this:

Model -> View

and turns it into this:

Model -> Decorator -> View

Where Microsoft calls the Decorator the "ViewModel".


This is exactly what I was thinking when you said you wanted to separate your 'selected' bool from your model.

Now that I think about it, I've actually used MVVM a lot but just didn't know it had a name.