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I want to build a command line interface with menus and sub-menus and eventually the leafs of the tree should be operations like.. bank management -> account management -> add acount (insert account info) And I'm looking for a good way which works with the OO principles...

Thanks for any piece of advice!

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    navigating a CLI can be seen as traversing a state machine, with each state a menu and the edges the commands at each menu
    – ratchet freak
    Commented Mar 27, 2013 at 10:38
  • yeah..but should do it with a while loop? or what..im stuck with it
    – aclowkay
    Commented Mar 27, 2013 at 11:10
  • I tried making a "menunude" abstract class which has the sub classes menu and operation..menu has a list of menus and operation has an execute function which does whatever it's supposed to do...the problem is what to put in the main thingy
    – aclowkay
    Commented Mar 27, 2013 at 11:27

1 Answer 1

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if you want OO I suggest a Menu interface with methods to write out the options and parsing the input and returning the next Menu

so your main loop becomes:

Menu menu = new StartMenu();
    while(menu.isExit){
    menu.writeOptions(stdOut);
    Menu res = menu.parseInput(stdIn.readline());
    if(res==null)
        writeError(stdOut);
    else
        menu=res;
}
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  • But what If I want to encapsulate the whole loop inside a seperate menu class,How should I do that?
    – aclowkay
    Commented Mar 27, 2013 at 11:58
  • You could put this code inside a static method in the base class if you really wanted to. Call it RunMenu().
    – Ben313
    Commented Mar 27, 2013 at 16:33

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