From kde-kimageshop  Sat Aug 14 21:59:44 1999
From: "Tomas Furmonavicius" <f1926 () kaunas ! aiva ! lt>
Date: Sat, 14 Aug 1999 21:59:44 +0000
To: kde-kimageshop
Subject: Document - View - "Engine" object model
X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=kde-kimageshop&m=93466792615064

Hi,

I was thinking about current implementation of object model in KOffice (and
KDE2).
Now (as far as I understand), once you insert an object (subdocument) to
the KOffice document you can't change the program which is used to
manipulate data - once you insert KImage object to KWord doc, it's not
possible to edit that subdocument with KImageShop. Of course it's classic
object definition and behaviour - data and algorithms are tied together,
but such behaviour is also very restrictive, as data can be very
"abstract", for example, image files are not tied to the program which was
used to create them - you can open picture which was saved by XV with GIMP.
KFM can offer different programs to manipulate given mimetype too. 

Isn't it possible to implement kind of Document - View - "Engine" object
model ?
It means, that document and program used to edit it is not tied together.
Say, if you have some document with mimetype image/tiff, you can use
different "engines" to use (view, edit ) it - KImage, KImageShop, KView and
maybe others in the future. And one could change these "engines" on the
fly, without closing views and unloading document from the memory. Only
when the last view of document is closed, document is removed from memory
too.

Such behaviour could also eliminate most of File Open/Save dialogs - ones I
hate most ;-) and offer more flexibility.

Tomas