This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz by James Robertson. Original Post: Nifty BOSS Helper Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants Feed URL: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssBlog/rssBlogView.xml Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general. Latest Agile Buzz Posts Latest Agile Buzz Posts by James Robertson Latest Posts From Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants

• Moved a class or classes to a different namespace?
• Renamed a class?

You can handle these in schema migration code, but with complexity. What Dave has done is publish a package that makes it easier. Normally, I open an existing BOSS file for reading like this:

stream := 'somefile.bos' asFilename readStream.
bos := BinaryObjectStorage onOld: stream.

With Dave's changes, you do it like this:

mappings := Dictionary new.
mappings at: 'Foo.Bar' put: 'Baz.Bar'.
stream := 'somefile.bos' asFilename readStream.
bos := BinaryObjectStorage onOld: stream withMappings: mappings.

What you'll then get is that all instances of class Foo.Bar will map over to instances of Baz.Bar. This is something that should make the work Rich Demers is doing on BottomFeeder much easier to integrate - he's building a brand new domain, and the current save files reference the current one. What this also does is make refactorings less onerous in the face of an installed base - one of the reasons I haven't rearranged the existing domain was the hassle of dealing with this problem. Nifty piece of work.