Constructor Amanuensis

This essay is about a suggested student project in Java programming. This essay gives a rough overview of how it might work. It does not describe an actual complete program. I have no source, object, specifications, file layouts or anything else useful to implementing this project. Everything I have to say to help you with this project is written below. I am not prepared to help you implement it; I have too many other projects of my own.

I do contract work for a living, which could include writing a program such as this. However, I don’t do people’s homework for them. That just robs them of an education.

You have my full permission to implement this project any way you please.

This is one of the amanuensis projects. The Constructor amanuensis is a Java Program that helps you rapidly generate boring repetitive code to provide a variety of constructors to a class.

Why use it?

The code generated is more likely to be accurate. How many times have you written a constructor then neglected to do something with one of the parameters? or done receipt = this.receipt instead of this.receipt = receipt ? The compiler will never warn you.
Generating this sort of code by hand is tedious, boring and hence error prone.
Even if the amanuensis could not produce code 100% ready to run, it would be accurate, and safer to use global search and replace on to customise it.

One kind of code I find exceedingly boring to write and maintain goes like this:

Then you have to write several variants where you leave out some or all of the fields.

How does this amanuensis work?

You fill in the names of your class and the member variables, possibly by cut/paste or my just pasting the entire code of your class onto the Applet.
You fill in the attributes of the fields by clicking selecting listboxes, or fill in the blanks.
You fill in a 0, 1 or 2 lines of Javadoc for each field.
You click the CLASS button, then it generates code like this for you:
Beside each member variable is a checkbox. You can turn it on or off.
You then click the CONSTRUCTOR button and it generates the code for a constructor using those variables as input:
You can then change the checkboxes and punch out the variant constructors like cookie cutters. e.g.
You then click the GET/SET button and it generates the code for all the dummy get set JavaBean property methods for each of the variables. You may throw some of these away later, or polish them up by changing the public scope, or adding safety checks.
The amanuensis might save this template away, so that you could come back to it, modify the comments, variable names, add new variables, etc, and crank out everything again, without having to edit each piece of it individually.
When you want to extend a final class, the amanuensis could generate all the little dummy wrapper methods for you to fake it.

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