[Justin W. Williams]

Ok. I am working on my first "real" Cocoa project. I am aiming for simplicity now. I wanna track a person's work in the gym. Here's what I have in the interface so far.

* Pulldown Menu w/ types of workouts (Chest Day, Leg Day, etc) [NSPopupButton]
* Dates of workouts (ie. Chest Day on 4/22/02) [NSTableView w/ 1 column]
* Table with Exercise Name, Reps, Weight, # of Sets, and general notes [NSTableView w/ 5 columns]
* A Drawer with listing of Exercises available (Bench press, Squats, etc) [Not sure whether to use NSTableView or NSView or what]


Aside from my issue with how to set up the drawer, I am having problems with trying to decide the best way to implement my classes. My method of thinking right now is to have a class named Exercise that is a subclass of NSObject w/ 5 instance variables inside (exerciseName, reps, sets, weight, notes) and then a class named Workout that is a subclass of NSObject with date, and a list of the exercises in this workout.

I am not sure how to really do the Workout class.

Any help is appreciated.

[Chuckit]

I'm not sure exactly where you need help. It sounds like you already know what you want to do. An NSCalendarDate and an NSMutableArray of Exercises and you should be good to go. And I'm not really clear on how you're planning on hooking things together, but it sounds like it would make sense to make the current Workout the data source for your NSTableView too.

And as for the list of exercises--unless you have some particular quirk to the list or something, a one-column NSTableView sounds like it should be exactly what you're looking for.

I'm not sure exactly what context this will be used in, but one other thing that immediately occurs to me is that you might also want a Person class to store all of the Workouts a person has done. (Then again, if you're anticipating only a single-user system, you may as well just write it straight to a file.)

[EDIT: Accidentally wrote "delegate" instead of "data source."]

[ 04-23-2002: Message edited by: Chuckit ]

[kman42]

A weigh-in variable in the person class would be good to

kman

[Justin W. Williams]

Originally posted by Chuckit:
<STRONG>I'm not sure exactly where you need help. It sounds like you already know what you want to do. An NSCalendarDate and an NSMutableArray of Exercises and you should be good to go. And I'm not really clear on how you're planning on hooking things together, but it sounds like it would make sense to make the current Workout the delegate for your NSTableView too.</STRONG>

I am not sure how I should hook up the Exercise class and Workout class. Do I even need to do it with two classes? This is my first real dive into Object-Oriented programming, so I am just trying to reassure myself.

I'm not sure exactly what context this will be used in, but one other thing that immediately occurs to me is that you might also want a Person class to store all of the Workouts a person has done. (Then again, if you're anticipating only a single-user system, you may as well just write it straight to a file.)

Right now, I am just building this for myself to see what I can accomplish, so multi-user isn't really an issue.

[kman42]

Just stick with the view-controller-model idea of design. You have the models down (Excercise and Workout) and the views are taken care of more or less by IB. You just need a Controller class to take care of the middle stuff--accessing the models and displaying on the interface.


You will want Workout to have an NSArray (or NSMutableArray) containing references to the instances of Excercise that correspond to each excercise you do (curls, hip press, etc) in that particular instance of Workout (chest, legs, whatever).

You might want your controller to keep a master array containing all of the possible instances of Excercise so that you can access them to edit the number of reps, etc. You will probably want this to be a mutable array so you can add and remove excercises. The controller should also have an array containing references to the instances of Workout. Your encoding will be pretty easy. The controller should encode the array of all possible excercises and the array of workouts. Workouts should then encode the array of excercises in that workout along with the instance variables of that workout. Excercise should encode all of its instance variables.

Mind you, I'm a newbie to Cocoa as well, but that's my two cents.

kman

[ 04-23-2002: Message edited by: kman42 ]

[Chuckit]

Originally posted by Justin W. Williams:
<STRONG>
I am not sure how I should hook up the Exercise class and Workout class. Do I even need to do it with two classes? This is my first real dive into Object-Oriented programming, so I am just trying to reassure myself.
</STRONG>

Well, like you said, a Workout is basically a date and a list of Exercises on that date, right? That tells you how to hook them up. For a date, you've got NSCalendarDate. For a list that you're going to be adding things to, the easiest way to do it is an NSMutableArray. So then, everytime the user creates an Exercise, you add it to the appropriate Workout's NSMutableArray of Excercises. That sounds like what you're looking for to me.