This section describes the syntax used in the toolkit to define objects in external files.
Note If you declare objects using the CHA Editor, you do not have to worry about the syntax. The general idea is that each class representing a simple (not aggregate) object has a corresponding tag, and that class attributes have corresponding tag attributes in that tag. For example, a ConstantFormat with a constantValue of QT56 would be represented by a tag such as the following:
<constant value="QT56" />
The constructors assign default values to any attributes of an object that are not specified in the tags.
Aggregate objects also have their tag name and tag attributes associated with the class name and attributes; however they can contain other tags for the component objects as shown in the following example:
Tag attribute values can include character references. A character reference takes the form &#xxx; in which the first character is an ampersand (&), the final character is a semi-colon (;), and xxx is the decimal character code. A combination of &#; (that is, without the character code) will be ignored. No test will be made to see if xxx is less than 255, and if xxx is greater than 65535 it will be considered an error.
By default, the value of the tag attribute value, if it exists, contains a String. However, you can use the combination &@ x to specify other object types, where the value of x indicates the object type to be instantiated. The constructor classname(String) of each class is used to instantiate the appropriate object. Possible values of x are:
Object type
Value
Object to instantiate
I
Integer
L
Long
d
Double
B
Boolean
D
Date (The format mm/dd/yyyy is expected)
F
Float
S
Short
C
Character
U
URL
For example:
<field id="aa" value="&@D11/15/1998" /> (instantiates a Date object) <field id="aa" value="&@Bfalse" /> (instantiates a Boolean object) <field id="aa" value="&@L12345678" /> (instantiates a Long object)