In this post, I am going to share some of my principles in designing the data sharing among GUIs and use an example in the comment left by Anonymous to demonstrate how they work.
The design procedure is fairly straightforward, simply following the four steps below should give you a clear picture as to how the data is communicated among all the GUIs in the application.
1. Draw out all the GUIs.
2. Connect the GUIs that will share data.
3. Determine the flow of the data for each connection.
4. Determine the possible action (push and/or pull) associated with the flow of data.
Let's try it with the sample problem below:
I am working on 3 GUIs (using GUIDE). GUI-1 will call GUI-2 (used to collect user inputs, process the input data) and then output the results to GUI-3.
Based on the description of the problem, the diagram in Figure 1 depicts the process of the design. Step 1 involves drawing there blocks for GUI-1, GUI-2, and GUI-3. Since it is stated that GUI-1 will call GUI-2 and then outputs the results to GUI-3, so connections are drawn between GUI-1 and GUI-2, GUI-1 and GUI-3. For the same reason, the flow of the data can be easily determined as from GUI-2 to GUI-1, and from GUI-1 to GUI-3. In Step 4, since it was stated that GUI-1 will call GUI-2, so I assign the pull action to the flow of data from GUI-2 to GUI-1, and since the data is processed by GUI-1 and output to GUI-3, I assign a push action to the flow of data from GUI-1 to GUI-3.
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| Figure 1. A sample design process |
In the next post, we will look at how to implement the data sharing based on the design.
