4.6 Group Discussion (class Discussion)

The Discussion class is a displayable artifact similar to the Annotation class. Its purpose is also to store text messages. It creates a DiscussionWindow frame that displays the containing text messages. The text messages are again stored with GipText objects. New messages are entered by the user through a TextField component of the DiscussionWindow. Every newly entered message is wrapped into a GipText object and is added to the Discussion object. Actually, only the GipTexts ID is stored, since the GipText is also an artifact. The client sends the changed Discussion object and the new GipText object to the server, which distributes those objects to all other clients.

  

Figure 4.19: The Discussion class.

The insertIntoSession method of the Discussion object is called once it is received by a client (see section 4.1). This Artifact method has been overridden in order to properly update the DiscussionWindow.