[Gdal-dev] Some thoughts on C# SWIG wrapper

[Richard Matsunaga]

Given that the bindings are still in an early state of development, there is
no time like the present to make breaking changes! It amounts to minor
changes to existing code in most cases.
 
Along the same lines, the usual namespace convention is
CompanyName.Whatever. It would be much cleaner if the Gdal and Ogr
namespaces were under a common parent, such as Osgf or something
appropriate.
 
The fake enums you describe is what I had in mind and would make things
easier to manage. The only danger with using constants like that is if the
original value changes, the maintenance becomes a nightmare.
 
Richard

  _____  

From: Simon Perkins [mailto:sy at perkins.net] 
Sent: March 2, 2007 4:50 PM
To: Richard Matsunaga
Cc: gdal-dev at lists.maptools.org
Subject: Re: [Gdal-dev] Some thoughts on C# SWIG wrapper


Richard Matsunaga wrote: 

I've just started using the C# bindings and have some questions.
 
1. Is the casing used in the bindings a by-product of SWIG, or can this be
changed to follow the usual conventions? e.g. the 'gdal' class, the 'GDAL'
namespace, the use of underscores


This would be nice, but I suspect that there are a number of people out
there using the existing bindings who might object to having to change their
code. Standard usage would have called the GDAL namespace "Gdal", and the
gdal class "Gdal" as well (I think this would work), but I can live with
this quirk.



 
2. Is it possible to make enums out of the constants (since the values are
dynamically generated, even separate classes would be better), so they have
some useful context? It makes it much harder for non GDAL/OGR experts to
find the correct values.


This would also be nice, but again we have the backwards compatibility
issue. We could keep the GDAL.gdalconst class, but add the enums into the
GDAL namespace, but then the GDAL functions that currently expect ints would
either have to be duplicated for enum versions, or we'd break code.

One option would be to fake the enums with classes like:

namespace GDAL
{
    public class DataType
    {
       public static const int Byte = 0;
       public static const int Int16 = 1;
       ...
    }
}

We could add these classes in addition to GDAL.gdalconst and allow people to
use them interchangeably.

Tamas: what do you think?

Cheers,

Sy


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