Re^9: a State machine with Roles - possible? (class or instance)

[salva]

Yes, a real common example is, on an event-based application, an object that has to do two (or more) things at the same time. For instance accessing a network service while tracking and external process or accessing a database.

You may be able to delegate most of the work needed to perform the subtasks to other objects (which would be unidimensional state machines). But there would be a point where you have to handle the interaction between them using a multidimensional state machine.

In any case, note that a multidimensional state machine can be converted into a unidimensional one if you flatten the state matrix using the cartesian product, or in practice, if you are able to organize the states in a tree (usually not all the multidimensional states may happen).

[LanX]

Thanks! =)

> You may be able to delegate most of the work needed to perform the subtasks to other objects (which would be unidimensional state machines).

This would be my first choice.

The main object has attributes referencing the state objects.

> But there would be a point where you have to handle the interaction between them using a multidimensional state machine.

Thats where I would use "proxy"/wrapper methods in the class of the main object.