[Ns-developers] ns-3.4 proposal: Object Name Service

[Tom Henderson]

Raj Bhattacharjea wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 21, 2009 at 2:54 PM, Raj Bhattacharjea <raj.b at gatech.edu> wrote:
>> Craig has prepared a branch for an "object name service".  The idea
>> grew out of the fact that people wanted to be able to refer to nodes
>> in their simulation by string names, and then extended from also
>> naming NetDevices to finally being able to name all Objects in the
>> system.
> 
> Good work Craig.  My comments follow.
> 
> 1. I'd propose a name/parameter refactoring change like:
> 
>  - Names::Add (std::string, Ptr<Object>);
>  + Names::NameObject(Ptr<Object>, std::string)
> 
> This would follow the verb+object function naming scheme.  I propose
> that all the "Add" methods are thus renamed and reordered such that
> the object being named comes first, followed by its name, followed by
> the context if necessary.

I came to a similar conclusion as Gustavo and now Craig, to prefer the 
ordering that is in the current repo.

> 
> 2. I propose some syntactic sugar, hiding the above API from the user;
>  essentially, a new Object base class API like
> Object::AssignName(std::string); this makes things less verbose and
> leads to changes like:
> 
> -  Names::Add ("/Names/client", n.Get (0));
> -  Names::Add ("/Names/server", n.Get (1));
> +  n.Get (0)->AssignName("/Names/client");
> +  n.Get (1)->AssignName("/Names/server");
> 
> Patch attached
> 

Originally, I thought about doing it the way you suggest (such as 
Node::SetName()) but I would agree with Gustavo that this seems to 
duplicate the newly proposed API without really saving any keystrokes.

Tom