#5 First Evaluation Approaches!

The first phase of coding is nearing its end, and the first evaluation is due on June 24th.

The first 4 weeks of GSoC have been immensely rewarding in terms of learning and working experience. Since the existing code was quite old, I encountered quite a few problems any time I worked on a new type of constraint. With the help of my mentor, I was able to fix pretty much all of those issues, saving one or two odd issues.

In this blog post, I'll discuss some more issues that I encountered along the way and their solutions in short.

1.

Once I started implementing checks for core attributes on spatial elements, I noticed sometimes they were not being stored in the UNKNOWN_XML. The attributes on a spatial element are read by the readAttribute() method of the respective spatial class. The problem was due to the statement like:

   boolean isAttributeRead = (super.readAttribute(attributeName, prefix, value))

                          && (SpatialConstants.shortLabel == prefix);

The problem here is the condition that prefix is the same as the shortLabel, which is nothing but the package name. Core attributes do not have any prefix and thus they are finally considered not processed as isAttributeRead becomes false.

Just removing the second condition does the fix and the core attributes are read properly.

2.

A major problem, due to which some constraints were facing issues, as I mentioned in the previous blog, was regarding the ListOf<> elements.

In classes such as Domain.java, there are ListOf<?> elements which are children on these classes in the XML. The checks for such ListOf<?> elements included checking core elements and attributes. 

The problem was that the unknown core elements or attributed were being added to the UNKNOWN_XML of a ListOf context object, but the ListOf was being duplicated during the flow of the program because of a faulty isSetListOf() method:

   public boolean isSetListOfInteriorPoints() {
      if ((listOfInteriorPoints == null) || listOfInteriorPoints.isEmpty()) {
         return false;
      }
      return true; 
   }

This method, apart from checking if the container is null, also checks if it is empty. As a result, new containers were being initialized in the code when the container was not populated.  So, the UNKNOWN_XML belonging to the previous container is lost and the checks fail. 

Again, just simply removing the condition listOfInteriorPoints.isEmpty() does the job and the tests start working properly.

In forthcoming blogs, I will start discussing the various categories (broadly) of constraint rules, and their implementation.

Till next time,
Cheers! :-D