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Value Engineer Aspects

Value engineer aspects extend the functional abilities of an input component's value engineer class.

For example, a value engineer may

provide a set of differences between the component's stored value and another value in order to aid with difference visualization,
provide support for search and indexing by generating a text value for search and a set of matches based on a given request, or
apply rules to validate a value which is to be stored in order to react to invalid component data.

Providing Aspects

The aspect provisioning process occurs within the component's implementation of the interface ValueEngineer<T>. A method getAspect(...) must be implemented and provide an object which implements the requested aspect if available.

FirstSpirit occasionally calls the method getAspect(...) with various aspect types as a parameter to identify if the editor's value engineer class supports a given aspect. If the value engineer supports the requested aspect, the method should return an object which implements that aspect; otherwise, it should return null.

Value Engineer Aspects by Category

Value Engineer Aspects
Difference Computation
Aspect	Description	Methods / Notes
DifferenceComputing<T>	Computes differences between two given values of an input component for difference visualization (e.g. in the version comparison dialog in SiteArchitect).	List<Difference> computeDifferences(T actualValue, T oldValue) produces a list of Difference objects which mark segments of the old and actual value objects as not changed, changed, inserted or deleted. Note: required by the Swing gadget aspect DifferenceVisualizing (see SiteArchitect Gadget Aspects).
Indexing and Search
Aspect	Description	Methods / Notes
MatchSupporting<T>	Provides a text representation of a given value object and identified a list of matches within a given value object based on a request object.	List<? extends Match> getMatches(Request request, T value) searches the given value object for matches (Match) of the given Request object.
ReferenceContaining<T>	Collects references (e.g. references to store elements or external URLs) within a given value object and provides a list of these references.	List<Reference> collectReferences(T value) identifies all references within the value as Reference objects and returns a list containing these references.

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