Designing the Application Data Model with the DOM

Every editor has some sort of model for its data. Application data is composed of primitive data types, such as integer, floating point, and binary. Some complex data elements may have attributes associated with them. For example, a rectangle type might have an upper left corner, width, and height, and all these attributes can be expressed with floating point numbers.

The ATF Document Object Model (DOM) is a framework for managing application data as a tree of nodes that can be adapted to other objects, edited, monitored, and stored persistently. The DOM performs a lot of work you would have to recreate if you develop your own application data system, and it goes well beyond simply describing application data. To learn more about the DOM, see DOM in a Nutshell.

You can express your model in some data definition language and write it to a type definition file. The ATF DOM offers its best support for the XML Schema Definition (XSD) language, or XML Schema for short.

For a general description of how to build a DOM data model, see It All Starts With Data in the DOM in a Nutshell section. To discover how the ATF Simple DOM Editor Sample defines its data model with an XML Schema, see Data Model. For information on how other samples do data modeling, see their descriptions in ATF Code Samples Discussions.

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