Question

Details:

My program is a grade book with 5 classes that are all aggregated. GradeBook has courses, Course has Categories, Category has Grades (all ArrayLists). My program also has a StateManager whose sole purpose is to return references to Objects because of the deep aggregation. In my Driver I do not create an instance of a GradeBook but a statemanager which has a static instance of a GradeBook with methods to return references.

My goal is to save all of this data to be reopened when the program is rerun.

Questions:

When I write the file all I need to do is write the StateManager object, correct? I think I’ve even accomplished this. I have the program create a “gradebook.data” file. Is there a way to open the .data file in a text program and see if it is writing correctly?

Where do I open the object again with inputstream? In the static main method or in the beginning of my method that initializes all of the graphics?

Thanks

Answer 1

Serializing StateManager won’t do anything because you have a static reference to the GradeBook. This is in itself a code smell, but here it has the physical repercussion of not getting serialized — only instance fields get serialized. So remove the static qualifier. You can make the StateManager itself a singleton and have a static reference to it.

However, I am still in doubt as to why you don’t serialize the GradeBook instance. That would be a far more logical approach. We don’t usually serialize service objects, but data objects, and you already have that separation.