C#/Custom User Controls: AtomSet Utilities

Overview: In a project whose goal is to convert a huge set of international street addresses obtained from hundreds of different sources to the format that is standard for its country, the code we develop at Melissa Data's executes a succession of processing steps. We want to see the effects of our code at each step to ensure it achieves what we expect or what else if not.  The AtomSetUtilities application is the solution I prepared to address this need.

There is an internal class that is the data storage unit for an international address in the sequence of processing steps, AtomSet.  Its data is stored in the raw format in which it was received from our sources in a normalized database, and assigned to the class members during class construction.  Because it concerns approximately 240 different national address formats, the definition of an AtomSet will sometimes change as development work continues, or because national formats vary. Also, the data it contains will require a variable number of entries in its components, so a viewer application must read and present each AtomSet in a dynamic way.

Because there are actually nine different steps in the execution sequence that we want to view I wrote a C# user control that I call the AtomSetViewerUserControl that can be dropped onto a UI area and loaded with whatever dataset is now required. The screenshot below shows one of these user controls containing three dynamically-placed text boxes on the AtomSetUtilities' configuration property page.

A particularly interesting feature that I've added, that was not in the original requirements, but which I thought would be helpful for communications between QA and Development is the ability to record and reload a Snapshot.  A Snapshot is a set of data values that are in the AtomSetUtilities' UI at some instant that have been serialized so that running state can be reloaded later.

Here is another property page with evidence of progress after some steps have completed:

Because I have responsibility for the development of 21 different development utility applications that concern similar subject matter I saw several violations of one of my favorite software design rules, the Once and Only Once rule.  That is stated from the hip as, "a rule should be coded once and only once, and any duplication should be eliminated by using a method that can be called from all places where the duplication was".  As I have developed the 21 applications I have prepared and efficiently made use of 23 libraries, among which are these: 1) the viewer described above; 2) the AtomSet used in all 21 applications; 3) a class definition that is displayed in a combobox; 4) a customized file class; 5) A custom file-open dialog containing an MRU list; 6) a international character culture translator; and, 7) a configuration serialization class.