OdeView: The Graphical Interface to Ode

Abstract

OdeView is the graphical front end for Ode, an object-oriented database system and environment. Ode's data model supports data encapsulation, type inheritance, and complex objects. OdeView provides facilities for examining the database schema 1990, examining class definitions, browsing objects, following chains of references starting from an object, synchronized browsing, displaying selected portions of objects (projection), and retrieving objects with specific characteristics (selection). OdeView does not need to know about the internals of Ode objects. Consequently, the internals of specific classes are not hardwired into OdeView and new classes can be added to the Ode database without requiring any changes to or recompilation of OdeView. Just as OdeView does not know about the object internals, class functions (methods) for displaying objects are written without knowing about the specifics of the windowing software used by OdeView or the graphical user interface provided by it. In this paper, we present OdeView, and discuss its design and implementation. © 1990, ACM. All rights reserved.