Capers Design #

  1. How is your .capers directory structured? What files / classes are you using to represent your repository state, and what information is contained in these files / classes?

    Our .capers. directory will be structured as follows:

    .capers
├── dogs
│   ├── <dog_name_1> 
│   ├── <dog_name_2>
│   └── ...
└── story

    The dogs folder will contain serialized Dog objects. Since Dogs have unique names, we will use that as the name of the files that each Dog object is serialized to.

    A Dog needs to know its int age, its String breed, and its String name. These will be stored as fields in the Dog class so that they are serialized.

    The story file will contain the current story. This file will contain plain text, because the story is plain text.

  2. What is the process of creating the story, then adding to it? How about creating a dog, then having its birthday? How does your .capers directory change?

    To create a story, we check if the file .capers/story exists. If the file exists, we read the file first using Utils.readContentsAsString, since the file contains plain text. Otherwise, our story is currently empty. Then, we add the text as a new line to the story, and write the updated story to .capers/story.

    When a dog is created with the dog command, we instantiate the Dog with the provided arguments. Then, we use the Dog::saveDog instance method to serialize the dog. Here, we use the Utils to save the Dog object to the file .capers/dogs/_name, where _name is the dog’s name. We also print out the dog’s toString.

    When we have a dog’s birthday, we use the provided name to read the Dog from the .capers/dogs directory. Then, we update the read dog’s age. Since the age has changed, we need to persist this new age by writing the dog back to the same file we read from (.capers/dogs/_name). After incrementing the age, we also print out the dog’s toString and the birthday celebratory message.

  3. Capers does not have branches, so we skip this question.

Serialization and Persistence #

  1. Creating a dog, having a birthday, creating a dog.

    Assume that this is the first time capers has been run.

    java capers.Main dog Sammie Samoyed 5

    First, we notice that the .capers folder doesn’t exist. We create the .capers and .capers/dogs directories.

    Then, we create a Dog with the provided info and serialize it. The file that it is serialized to is .capers/dogs/Sammie, so that we can access this dog in the future and give it birthdays.

    java capers.Main birthday Sammie

    Main reads the Dog Sammie from .capers/dogs/Sammie. We increment Sammie’s age by 1 and print Sammie and congratulations. Then, we serialize the updated age back to .capers/dogs/Sammie.