Advanced Object Oriented Programming with Visual FoxPro 6.0

Creating Visual FoxPro code

Creating Visual FoxPro code for a model already created means mostly filling in the blanks. In the real world, this means coding the actual methods and writing additional code such as startup programs or non-object parts of the application such as menus.

Most parts of the application are simply created as specified in the plan (model). In most languages, this means sitting down and typing in all classes and objects already designed. It also means redoing a lot of work. Visual FoxPro provides a much easier way with its Visual FoxPro Modeling Wizards. If you are a registered Visual FoxPro user, you can download these wizards from the Microsoft VFP Web site free of charge. The wizards will automatically generate Visual FoxPro code and even update existing models from the code you created.

In the actual implementation, the application details and even larger parts such as entire classes or modules might differ from your object model. In a perfect world this wouldn't happen, but in real-life scenarios it does. Here's one example: The object model could have a number of classes and objects that deal with menus. This might be fine in many languages, but not in Visual FoxPro because it has no object-oriented menus. For this reason, the implementation can differ. That's fine. However, you should document these things once they are implemented. The easiest way is (again) to use the two Visual FoxPro Modeling Wizards because they can analyze entire projects and update existing models. In this chapter I'll introduce only the Code Generation Wizard. The next chapter deals with the Reverse Engineering Wizard.