4. Data Structures

The XML tree is translated into a live tree of objects, but these objects may be thought of as if you were manipulating the XML tree directly. The structures/concepts that make up this tree are:

• ENode

  This is the basic in-memory node, it has attributes and stores the information about the item it builds when it is added to the tree. An enode is displayed as 'element.name', when element is the type of node, and name is the name attribute, if no name attribute is set, name will be an underscore and a unique number. ex 'button._342'. This is mapped into a Class in most languages, which you can use to bind to a node in a running Entity application. See the ENode API reference below for more details.

• Attribute

  This is an attribute of the enode, within the renderers functions are registered for when an attribute is set or requested. In OO speak, these act as methods of the class of the node type.

• Path

  A Path is how to describe where an enode is in the program, it starts at the root and progresses down the tree of enodes, putting the element.name representation seperated by '/'s until it gets the the destination enode. In most languages if you print an enode it will give its path.