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  1. OMG Issue

OCL25 — Multi-dimensional sortedBy

  • Key: OCL25-213
  • Status: open  
  • Source: Model Driven Solutions ( Dr. Edward Willink)
  • Summary:

    The sortedBy iteration provides an elegant solution to a sort problem in which the sort metric is a projection of the sorted object. Thus sortedBy(p|p.name) or just sortedBy(name) is short and avoids the opportunities for typos from a more conventional exposition involving comparison of two objects. The natural solution may well be an efficient one for large collections with non-trivial metrics.

    However the sortedBy solution is unfamiliar and so confusing for newcomers and unsuitable for multi-key sorting for which an artificial compound single key may need to be constructed.

    One solution might be to provide a more conventional iterator such as sort(p1, p2 | comparison-expression) allowing a two key sort:

    sort(p1, p2 | let diff1 = p1.key1.compareTo(p2.key1) in
    if diff1 <> 0 the diff 1 else p1.key2.compareTo(p2.key2) endif)

    However this has poor readability and ample opportunities for typos.

    Alternatively sortedBy with a Tuple-valued metric might support multiple keys as:

    sortedBy(Tuple

    {first=key1,second=key2}

    )

    (The alphabetical order of the Tuple part names determines the priority.)

    (Since sortedBy is declaratively clear and compact, inefficient small/trivial implementations can be optimized to their sort() equivalents.)

  • Reported: OCL 2.4 — Sat, 20 Jan 2018 09:53 GMT
  • Updated: Sat, 20 Jan 2018 09:53 GMT