Application Framework, provides ready-to-use solutions for handling Application Data.
Open CASCADE Application Framework (OCAF) handles Application Data basing on the Application/Document paradigm. It uses an associativity engine to simplify the development of a CAD application thanks to the following ready-to-use features and services:
- Data attributes managing the application data, which can be organized according to the development needs
- Data storage and persistence (open/save)
- Possibility to modify and recompute attributes in documents. With OCAF it is easy to represent the history of modification and parametric dependencies within your model
- Possibility to manage multiple documents
- Predefined attributes common to CAD/CAM/CAE applications (e.g. to store dimensions)
- Undo-Redo and Copy-Paste functions
Since OCAF handles the application structure, the only development task is the creation of application-specific data and GUIs.
OCAF differs from any other CAD framework in the organization of application data, as there the data structures are based on reference keys rather than on shapes. In a model, such attributes as shape data, color and material are attached to an invariant structure, which is deeper than the shapes. A shape object becomes the value of Shape attribute, in the same way as an integer number is the value of Integer attribute and a string is the value of Name attribute.
OCAF organizes and embeds these attributes in a document. OCAF documents, in their turn, are managed by an OCAF application.
For more details see OCAF User's Guide.
See also: E-learning & Training.