DataLink implementation in SOFA

[hugtalbot]

I suggest we use this issue card to track ongoing work (aka as dashboard/ChangeLog) Observation: Link implementation is invasive too complex, thus making SOFA respectively long to compile and hard to maintain / support.

An ongoing work led by @damienmarchal aims at:

• simplifying the Link implementation:
  • avoiding the use of Traits
  • split SingleLink into several cases: links between Data (DataLink), links between multiple Data (DataMultiLink?) links between BaseObject (?)
• reducing massively used / included of SingleLinks

DONE:

• introduce Data Link (#1491 )
• remove duplicated SingleLink<> parentData in BaseData to ease further refactoring (#1491 )
• replace the use of the SingleLink by a DataLink class in BaseData.h (#1491 )
• remove traits code from Link.h and BaseLink.h. (#1503 )
• remove reflection code in BaseData (#1541)

Also done:

• use forward declaration to reduce dependency (due to headers included in header) between modules --> cleaning code dependency graph and reducing compilation time (#1509 )
• DataContentValue : was there as DataValue, extracted from Data and renamed as DataContentValue
• PathResolver : mechanism to generalize for resolving path (parsing string, search in graph, convert in to an object), extracted from Link in order isolate it (for now reoriente towards existing SOFA functions)

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Next step :

• refactoring the whole Link to separate SingleLink & MultiLink
• rename AbstractDataLink as BaseDataLink ?
• remove reflection mechanism inn BaseData (due to removal of SingleLink for Data)

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Suggested labels:

[damienmarchal]

Thank you a lot.