Hi there,

i'm currently trying to write a kind of XML-Parser for my gui framework and i'm struggling with the object creation.

So a possible XML-File could look like this:

<Window id="Notification" title="Notification" message="An Error occured while...">
   <button id="Button_try_again" caption="Try again" />
   <button id="Button_cancel" caption="cancel" />
</Window> 

For iterate through all tags i'm using StaX. The name of each tag is accessible by calling the getLocalName()-method.

Furthermore there is an corresponding class for each valid tag (just like window and button in the example above) and i need to get an object of one of them.

So here is a little snippet of what came to my mind to achieve this:

String tagname = Staxparser.getLocalName();

if(tagname.equalsIgnoreCase("Window")) {
     // instantiate window class
} else if(tagname.equalsIgnoreCase("Button")) {
     // instantiate button class
}

Well, this looks pretty much nasty and should not be done like this.

So here is the actual question:

Is there a way to not use a whole bunch of if-else-statements to figure out what class needs to be instantiated?

Is there a design pattern or anything else that is able to simplify the problem?

Thanks in advance.

This doesn't change things in a absolute sense. Someplace, under-the-hood or not, there will be a loop, if-else-if cascade or switch statement that ends up instantiating types from strings. The only difference is where this code exists and who wrote it (you, the compiler, an API or a synergistic combination).

At some point or another, there has got to be some controll structure to make things work. Such structures are the first main feature that differ programming languages from descriptive languages like HTMl, etc... . You can't just expect to get rid of all if-else by some kind of black magic, and why would you want to in the first place? What the OP wants makes sense, he wants to get rid of a potential hundreds of nestes if-else's to read all possible types of gui elements in, therefore also making things more modular.

To be all honsest, I personally would just create a ILoadRoutine-interface, and derive for each widget(type?) an implementation from it. Then store those by string in an array or such structure, look them up by the name of the tag, and call a "Create(...)"-method. In this method, you handle the instantiation of the class, and all proper setup. Thats how I'd do it, would even work without any if/else, but don't know if this is a commonly seen good method or not...

Hi there,

i'm sorry for not replying until now.

So there are 3 Options i can choose from:

• a catalog system to map the elements used in the xml to its corresponding entities
• reflection
• existing xml marshalling frameworks like JAXB

So i tried out the reflection approach during the weekend and at some point i realized that i am not able to generalize all possible entities due to the fact that a button maybe has different attributes than a label.

A catalog system seems to be a much easier way to handle this. But in my opinion there is another problem:

For every entry in the catalog system, representing a special widget, there must be another dictionary that contains every possible attribut for that special widget. This can grow a lot since more and more widgets are implemented.

In the end i will try out JAXB. As far as i read through some examples its mostly based on annotations and should be working fine.

So thanks to all of you for your advices, it helped me a lot.

For every entry in the catalog system, representing a special widget, there must be another dictionary that contains every possible attribut for that special widget.

You are making a xml file with many different objects alive in your system side. The fact that you instantiate proper objects on those types, will not somehow miracly get you rid off managing them and aproaching them the way their datatype demands (a label is not window so much). You should rethink deeply not only instantiating them conditianaly, but runinng them conditionaly. The aproach I use is that I use inharitance and that I have an all shared class, and inside that most basic class I have an int that detects their highest datatype- the type. This gives me assurance that anywhere in my code ever I will be able to do type conditional aproaches to them. The nummber in the most basic class is simply set in constructor of any class that inherits the all shared class.