Teh Zhi Thon - Project Portfolio

The autocomplete mechanism is facilitated by the NewAutoCompletionBinding class. It represents the binding of the autocomplete window to the CommandBox and is the component that manages the interactions between the text input and the contents of the autocomplete list that is displayed in the window. This feature observes the text input in the CommandBox and displays a list of words in another window under the CommandBox for the user to select and complete his current focus text - the word he is currently typing.

The key components in this class are the autoCompletionPopup and the caretChangedListener that perform the key functionalities.

caretChangedListener is an observer that checks the caret in the command box and is triggered whenever the caret changes its position, whether a character is typed or the caret is moved using the arrow keys. When triggered, it reads the text in the command box and checks the position of the caret, then extracts the current word of target to be completed as well as the current input text and the prefix of the current word if any. Extraction is done by tracing back from the caret position and as well as tracing forward. Any characters that are not a whitespace and are not separated by a whitespace are considered to be the same word as the current word to be completed. The text before and after the word to completed are also saved so they will not be lost upon completion.

This listener passes the extracted String input to the CustomSuggestionProvider through updateSuggestions.

CustomSuggestionProvider reads the word to be competed and the input text. It trims and splits the input text and find the index of the word to completed. It reads the first input first as it is the key command word and performs a different operation on the input string depending on the command word as well as any possible following parameters.

Functions which are supported by autocomplete will parse the input individually through the different private methods available in CustomSuggestionProvider. Once it has decided which set of texts to be the new word suggestion bank, it calls the CustomSuggestionProvider#updateSuggestions overloaded method to update the SuggestionProvider.

After updating the SuggestionProvider, NewAutoCompletionBinding#SetUserInput calls onUserInputChanged which is responsible for updating the suggestions list according to what the word to be completed is. As this class was tweaked from the library implementation, the threading involved in this method will not be detailed. It updates the list of suggestions by comparing the user input word to the list of suggestions and passes the resultant list to the autoCompletionPopup which will proceed to display the list of text in the popup below the command box.

Now back to the autoCompletionPopup, whenever the user highlights a selected word input and selects it, the autoCompletionPopup#setOnSuggestion is triggered and will try to complete the word with the selected text and once completed, it hides the popup and sets the caret to the end of the newly completed word.

The following sequence diagram shows how the auto completion operation works:

The findtag mechanism is also facilitated by ModelManager. FindTagCommand calls ModelManager#updateFilteredRecords and passes in different predicates depending on the input by the user.

This feature has only one keyword findtag and a single working mode which takes in any number of input arguments. The input given by the user is passed to FindTagCommandParser#parse to split the desired tags the user wants to search by into an array of strings. The array of strings is passed into TagsContainsKeywordsPredicate to create the predicate for updateFilteredRecordList required in ModelManager.

In TagsContainsKeywordsPredicate, to compare for a match, every keyword in the array is compared against the set of tags of each record and as long as any tag matches any of the keywords, the predicate will evaluate to true and allows the FilteredList to filter out the records that do not fulfil the predicate.

FindTagCommandParser returns a FindTagCommand object which calls updateFilteredRecordList to set the new predicate and obtain a new filteredRecords based on the predicate, which will also trigger an event for the UI to read in and display the new records.

The following sequence diagram shows how the limit operation works:

The sort mechanism is facilitated by ModelManager. It extends FinancialPlanner with a component that sorts the internal list of records. SortCommand calls ModelManager#sortFilteredRecordList and passes in the category to be sorted by and the sort order.

This feature has one keyword sort and takes in arguments of either category or order of sort. Keywords are not case sensitive.

Category can be either of the following keywords: name, date, money, moneyflow

Order can be either of the following keywords: desc - descending, asc - ascending

This feature has 2 different kind of modes as follows:

The input given by the user is passed to SortCommandParser to split the input separated by whitespaces to ensure there is either only one or two arguments input by the user. These arguments are stored in an array of strings and the size of the array determines the mode of the command.

The strings are compared to two sets of strings containing the supported categories and orders of the function. The string of the category and a boolean representing whether the records are to be reversed will then be passed to ModelManager to sort the records.

Since the displayed list in the UI is a FilteredList which is a wrapper for the underlying list UniqueRecordList structure, sorting the internal list of records in versionedFinancialPlanner will post an event that notifies the UI to update the displayed list.

The following sequence diagram shows how the sort operation works: