[Gnumed-devel] problem with UI/logic separation

[Karsten Hilbert]

What's the "best"/accepted way to deal with this: non-GUI code
needs to make GUI functions run but has no good way of simply
returning with an error so that the (GUI level) caller can
take appropriate action ?

Specific situation:

gmClinicalRecord.__init__() tries to make sure there is an
active/ongoing encounter. If it finds one with an age between
the soft time-to-live and the hard time-to-live it must ask
the user whether to consider that one as still active or to
proceed with creating a new encounter ...

There are several options:

- do away with soft/hard timeouts (undesirable)
- only use hard timeout on __init__ (flawed)
- decompose into __init__ and init_encounter() which can
  return error codes (cumbersome, undesirable)
- provide __init__ with a callback function for asking
  questions at the UI level (doesn't feel clean)
- just fail the __init__ constructor and let the caller handle
  the error (cumbersome to fail __init__ specific enough to
  let the caller know what to do)

What's your suggestion ?

Karsten
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