How to bundle extension methods requiring configuration in a library
- by Greg
Hi,
I would like to develop a library that I can re-use to add various methods involved in navigating/searching through a graph (nodes/relationships, or if you like vertexs/edges). The generic requirements would be:
There are existing classes in the main project that already implement the equivalent of the graph class (which contains the lists of nodes / relationships), node class and relationship class (which links nodes together) - the main project likely already has persistence mechanisms for the info (e.g. these classes might be built using Entity Framework for persistance)
Methods would need to be added to each of these 3 classes: (a) graph class - methods like "search all nodes", (b) node class - methods such as "find all children to depth i", c) relationship class - methods like "return relationship type", "get parent node", "get child node".
I assume there would be a need to inform the library with the extending methods the class names for the graph/node/relationships table (as different project might use different names). To some extent it would need to be like how a generics collection works (where you pass the classes to the collection so it knows what they are).
Need to be a way to inform the library of which node property to use for equality checks perhaps (e.g. if it were a graph of webpages the equality field to use might be the URI path)
I'm assuming that using abstract base classes wouldn't really work as this would tie usage down to have to use the same persistence approach, and same class names etc. Whereas really I want to be able to, for a project that has "graph-like" characteristics, the ability to add graph searching/walking methods to it.
