The class Bounded	The Document and Graphics Classes	The class Protocols

The class HierarchyNode

In Sketch, a document consists of a hierarchy of objects. Each object has at most one parent and belongs to at most one document. That is, an object may not belong to any compound object or document, but if it belongs to one, it cannot be part of two compound objects or two documents.

An object in this hierarchy knows which parent and document it belongs to.

The class HierarchyNode provides the standard interface for managing this hierarchy and the references to the parent and the document for child objects. The default behavior for parents is defined by the class Compound.

No object derived from this class should override the methods defined here except as documented.

Instance Variables

HierarchyNode uses the following instance variables:

parent

The parent of the object. Since the parent also has a reference to its child this introduces a circular reference. Therefore we must make sure that these references are deleted when the document is destroyed. The Destroy method takes care of this.

If the object is not currently the child of a compound object this variable should be None.

document

The document the object belongs to. If the object has just been created and is not yet inserted into the document, or when the object is stored in the application's clipboard, this variable is None.

In general, if parent is not None, document should be the same as parent.document.

Methods

Methods defined in HierarchyNode (incomplete):

__init__

A HierarchyNode's __init__ method (and that of all derived classes) must accept an optional keyword argument called duplicate with the default value None and it must be callable with just that argument. This is used by the standard Duplicate method.

Destroy()

Called by the parent when the document is destroyed. This method should delete any circular references. A Compound object should call the Destroy method of each of its children.

The default implementation just sets parent to None. Derived classes should extend this method if necessary.

SetParent(parent)

Set self's instance variable parent to parent.

SetDocument(document)

Set self's instance variable document to document.

Duplicate()

Return a duplicate of self. The default implementation just returns self.__class__(duplicate = self). Therefore, the class's constructor must be callable with a single keyword argument duplicate.

The class Bounded	The Document and Graphics Classes	The class Protocols