Uh oh, you know you’re in for trouble when the first thing is a disclaimer: This is meant to demo a *technique*, not necessarily a practical application of that technique, fair?
This was motivated by a brief discussion with @PANCSoftware. It may or may not be even close to what he’s trying to achieve, but it seemed something worth demonstrating anyway.
HERE IS THE SOURCE if you’d like to follow along. I don’t plan on writing a whole lot about the code, comments are there for those interested enough to study it. (‘cuz if not interested enough to study it, then no point in me writing at length about it, right?)
What the code is intended to demonstrate is a metamethod whereby a containing class can serve as proxy for several different data categories and keep track of them all in a manner transparent to the end-user (aka developer).
(This will likely seem trivial nonsense if you’re coming here as a Lua expert. On the other hand might seem like black magic if you’re coming here as a typical Corona newbie. So the intended audience is somewhere in the middle of those two extremes.)
The scenario is a game’s user-data. Games often have two distinct categories of data:
(and of course there are others, like music/sound settings that might need to persist, etc)
The technique used here is to provide a “prototype” to the class, indicating which properties are intended to be temporary and which are persistent. The class is agnostic – it doesn’t really know or care anything about your user data, other than what you “tell it” via the prototype.
The class then hides those details from you and provides “simple” access to those properties, for example userdata.score and userdata.hiscore. Internally those are stored separately, so that when it comes time to serialize to disk, the class “knows” which properties to include.
Take a look at the code if interested, that’s all for now. I may expand upon this in the future, maybe provide some code walk-through or etc, if seems needed.