Object conversion in front of the direction of a flat object space into a classes - structured space

摘要

An object conversion system which allows applications and their data to migrate from a classless object space to a class-based object space independently of other applications and data. A set of procedures operate upon, update, and maintain a set of four tables, including, (1) a field location table for use in determining whether a field was created by a classless object model application or a class-based object model application; (2) a field method table for storing mappings from fields to both their corresponding class and method for access; (3) an identification table for storing the mapping between a classless object ID and its corresponding class-based object ID; and (4) an object description table for storing the mapping between a classless object ID to every field associated with that classless object ID. The procedures which operate upon these tables include (1) field creation means for creating a field; (2) field retrieval means for retrieving the value of a field; (3) field setting means for setting the value of a field; (4) object field retrieval means for retrieving the values of every field for a given classless object ID; (5) proxy object creation means for creating a classless object ID for a newly-created local class-based object; (6) proxy object deletion means for removing the classless object ID for a deleted or migrated class-based object; and (7) object location means for locating the classless object IDs for all objects having a given value for a given field.