Design of visual development framework for general conditional logic

Background

Development of visual programming

With the rapid application and development of computer, computer software rapidly spread to all walks of life, the rapid development of software to meet customer demand is more and more urgent, but as the application of software gradually into the depth of the industry business, with the needs of the customer requirements become increasingly difficult to meet. The ancients said: "工欲善其事, its prerequisite", based on traditional text programming is increasingly unable to meet these challenges. The powerful IDE (integrated development environment) comes into being, and powerful Ides provide an efficient visual programming environment, and the visibility of different application domains in the visual programming environment varies. Some provide the visualization of the interface construction, and some even provide the visual programming of the program flow control, greatly enhance the business development ability in the corresponding application field, and improve the informatization degree of the application domain.

Visual IF conditional Logic programming requirements

Traditional visual Ides are designed to visualize programming elements, to convert elements of programming to multiple small visual objects, and then to develop support for visual editors to edit these programming elements. In many mature visual programming IDE, the IF/ELSE expression logic takes a evasive attitude, because If/else for the program flow condition control, is not the direct visual programming element, therefore many mature Ides support based on the visual element the IF condition expression, but cannot directly express I F/else logic. The immediacy of this expression is a stark contrast to the if/else conditional logic IDE representation and traditional programmer development habits, in addition, this kind of directness causes many problems such as poor readability, poor reusability, maintenance difficulties, learning difficulties and potential risks, which are very obvious in the practical development and application. As the mature IDE becomes more and more operational, the visualization of this inefficiency is becoming more and more prominent in practical applications, which makes it more and more urgent for IDE to realize the visual support of this if/else conditional logic expression.

For the more mature IDE, if direct modification and increase will bring greater risks and difficulties, based on these considerations, need to seek an indirect way to obtain support, so that the mature IDE can easily support the development of visual if/else logical expression. According to the existing development experience and design concept, using a framework of independent support VIE (Visual if/else) programming and the existing IDE phase-connecting, can reduce the difficulty and risk of development and improve the development efficiency.

VIE Solutions

The problems facing

According to the discussion of visual programming in [1] (see Reference resources), this paper thinks that for a visual framework, it is necessary to solve two problems, on the one hand, in visualization, we should provide a flexible editor enough to meet the needs, and carry out efficient and convenient Demonstrates and edits the relationship between visual elements and visual elements, and on the other hand, resolves the logical relationship behind the visual editor, including the correspondence of the Editor runtime and the system-edited correspondence on the consistency of the logical relationship. For the editor Run-time problem, that is, in the user visual changes in the editor graphics elements, these operations include drag, double-click, move, stretch, connection, etc., to respond flexibly to this processing logic and processing methods to ensure that the corresponding logical relationship changes. For the corresponding problem after the system is edited, that is to solve the logical relationship after the IDE is closed, the logical relationship reading after the IDE startup, the successful construction of the build program and the generator program are successfully run according to the design logic.