Assignment 7: Beyond gOOD:   A Simple Spreadsheet, Part 3
1 Goals
2 Step 0:   Cleaning up your design
3 Step 1:   Adding editing controls to a new view
3.1 Motivation
3.2 Requirements
4 Step 2:   Editing arbitrary cells
4.1 Requirements
5 Steps 0–∞:   Testing
6 Design tips
6.1 Dividing functionality into MVC
6.2 Handling the keyboard, generally
6.3 Mouse handling
7 Step 4:   Extra-credit functionality
8 Grading standards
9 Submission
7.5

Assignment 7: Beyond gOOD: A Simple Spreadsheet, Part 3

Due: Tue 11/26 at 8:59pm; self-evaluation due Wed 11/27 at 9:59pm

This assignment is to be completed with the same partner as Assignment 6, unless you have been reassigned.

1 Goals

In this assignment you will complete your spreadsheet application. So far, you’ve designed a model that can represent spreadsheets, a builder to be used in reading spreadsheets from files, and a visual view that can display a model you’ve built. But to turn this simple viewer into a more useful editing tool, we need to add some functionality to it: we’d need to be able to add, remove, or modify cells in the spreadsheet and what effect our edits have. Building this new functionality should not break anything we’ve already gotten working, though, so your existing views should remain and continue to work.

This assignment is organized as follows:

Please read through carefully, to make sure you haven’t missed any requirements or hints that might help you.

2 Step 0: Cleaning up your design

Most likely, you have an interface for a view, which is directly implemented by your text and visual views. You will notice that some views offer operations that other views do not (e.g. only the visual view has the notion of “scroll position”). The ideal design here is a single interface whose methods are phrased sufficiently generally that they can be applicable to both views. For example, rather than a method to “scroll to a given position”, you might have a method “ensure a given position is visible”: by phrasing it this way, your visual view could scroll, while your text view need not do anything since all cells are already visible. If you cannot revise your design to make this work, then you may create a super interface that offers all functions, and then have individual views suppress some of them (for example, by throwing UnsupportedOperationException).

Interaction, or “back-and-forth between the user and the program” makes the role of a controller more well-defined and non-trivial than it may have seemed in the previous assignment. Like views and models, controllers are best described as an interface whose purpose is to mediate the interactions between the view and the model. Multiple implementations of controllers are possible — potentially a specialized one for every model/view pairing. However it is also possible to implement a single controller that works for all your views: it depends on your design. For this assignment, you should only need a single controller.

3 Step 1: Adding editing controls to a new view

3.1 Motivation

Since we’re going to be editing spreadsheets, we’ll want to have the ability to see the raw formulas in our spreadsheets and edit them. Since displaying the formulas could take up more space than the cells you have, you’ll need some additional UI to manipulate the formulas. One possible UI might look like a toolbar:

3.2 Requirements

  1. Design a new view that contains the existing visual view as a component within it, and adds the following abilities:

    1. Select an individual cell by clicking on it. This should provide some obvious visual feedback to the user — in the screenshot above, I highlight the border of the cell, but you may choose another UI if you wish.

    2. Displaying the full formula for that cell somewhere editable — in the screenshot above, I place that formula in a textbox in the toolbar, but you may choose another UI if you wish.

    3. Allowing a user to edit that formula and confirm or reject the edits — in the screenshot above I used the two toolbar buttons on the left, but you may choose another UI if you wish. If the edits are confirmed, the cell must be edited; if the edits are rejected, then the displayed formula must revert to the current contents of the cell.

    NOTE: You should not add this functionality directly to the existing visual view; you should build a new, composite view, and leave your existing visual view alone.

  2. Add an extra option to your command-line option: -edit. Specifying this option should open this editor view (as opposed to -gui which opened your non-editable graphical view from Assignment 6). All previous command-line arguments should continue to work as before.

For Assignment 6 you likely had a class that extends JFrame and implements YourViewInterface. You also very likely have had some class that extends JPanel and did all the “interesting” graphical work; the JFrame probably was pretty thin in terms of its own functionality. For this assignment you need to reuse the JPanel as a component in your new editor view; you do not have to reuse the JFrame class you created, and can develop a new one if needed. If your prior implementation did not create a custom panel, and had all of its implementation directly in your JFrame, then refactor your design so that it is more reusable.

You are free to design the interactions in any way you wish. However your application must meet the following standards:

4 Step 2: Editing arbitrary cells

Now that you have the ability to modify cells, you need to make sure that the user can modify any cells they wish. Moreover, any changes they make must be applied to the model, and any affected cells must be re-evaluated.

4.1 Requirements

  1. Enhance your editor view with the ability for the user to scroll indefintely to the right of the current rightmost cell, or down beneath the bottommost cell, and be able to edit any cell they choose. Ideally, this could be done simply by scrolling; if you chose a different UI, that is ok.

  2. As items are edited, the computed values of any affected cells must be recomputed and redisplayed immediately. (One expensive way to do this is simply to recompute all cells on every edit; a more efficiently designed solution is up to you.) Note that this may cause cycles in your model: your program must not crash if this happens, even if you do not currently explicitly detect cycles.

  3. Implement whatever controller, keyboard and mouse handlers you need to support the new view’s functionality. Place all the code of your views in the edu.cs3500.spreadsheets.view package, and the controller and handlers in the edu.cs3500.spreadsheets.controller package.

  4. Document any further changes made to your models or views from the previous assignments: explain what was added, removed or changed (besides the package declaration), and why. You should place this documentation in your code and a separate README.txt file. PLEASE DON'T FORGET TO SUBMIT THIS README FILE! (The file can be plaintext, with extension .txt, or Markdown, with extension .md. Please don’t forget the extension.)

Again, you are free to design the interactions in any way you wish. However your application must meet the same standards as in Requirements above.

5 Steps 0–∞: Testing

Testing any keyboard handlers is straightforward — by design, you may replace the Runnables with those that make it easier to confirm that the appropriate one is run with the appropriate key.

Testing the controller should also be straightforward — all of its behavior is either in its methods, or in the wiring-up of those methods to key, mouse or other event handlers/listeners. If you’ve already tested that the wiring works properly, now all that remains is to test the methods themselves.

  1. Write tests for various components of your application (controller, listeners). Note that this is distinct from writing tests for your visual and editor views — we are asking you to test the controller functionality, not the views’ appearance.

  2. Complete any testing from the last assignment that you didn’t otherwise finish.

6 Design tips

The following sections offer helpful design tips. You may find them useful or not, depending on how you choose your user interface elements. They are not required parts of your design.

6.1 Dividing functionality into MVC

Look at the code for the MVC examples and the turtles example. Notice how the functionality is divided into model, view and controller. Make your decisions based on the roles of these components.

Remember to consider the possibility of adding capabilities to views, or creating new views. If this happens, are the changes isolated and/or minimal? Is your controller really controlling the application? Is your model catering to the specific needs of some view?

6.2 Handling the keyboard, generally

Look at the code for the MVC examples. Since you may be using several keys in this assignment, using the map design is recommended. Recall how the controller gets control when a key is pressed: make sure your implementation of this assignment retains this essential ability of a controller.

6.3 Mouse handling

Mouse handling involves a MouseListener interface and possibly the MouseMotionListener interface, just as keyboard handling involved a KeyListener.

  1. Design a class that implements MouseListener. It probably does not need to be as sophisticated and indirect as the KeyboardHandler above, since there are only three possible mouse events (left, middle and right clicks), rather than an entire keyboard.

  2. Enhance your controller to create one of these mouse listener objects, and configure it however you need to.

  3. If you need to define only 1 or 2 of these listener methods, starting from a MouseAdapter may be simpler.

Hint: When you are testing each component above, be clear about what you are testing. The objective of testing the keyboard handler is to ensure that the appropriate action is taken on the appropriate key, not whether that action is successfully completed (that is part of testing the controller).

7 Step 4: Extra-credit functionality

For this assignment, there are a few small extra-credit enhancements you can try. Larger-scale enhancements will be separately explained in Assignment 9.

Add the ability for a user to save their edited computational masterpiece from within the GUI editor. A user should be able to save using the textual format from the previous assignment. For credit here, you must not simply merge your existing views into a single class, but rather keep your views separated and delegate to them as appropriate.

Add the ability for a user to load a file from within your UI.

Add the ability to use arrow keys to move the cell selection from one cell to its neighbors.

Add the ability to use the Delete key to clear a cell’s contents.

Do not attempt the extra credit unless you’ve completed the required functionality above. We will not count it as extra credit unless the required features are completed. (You will still have the opportunity for extra credit in Assignment 9.)

8 Grading standards

For this assignment, you will be graded on

9 Submission

To create a JAR file, do the following:

Please submit your homework to https://handins.ccs.neu.edu/ by the above deadline. Then be sure to complete your self evaluation by the second deadline.