Programming

In my previous post I wrote about whyI use object oriented Lotusscript. Let's look at how it can be used in a real-life application. Background At my work I developed a system to handle insurance claims. Each claim can have one or more claimants, people or parties that have either BI (bodily injury) or PD (property damage) claims related to an accident. Each claimant get a reserve setup, an amount of money the adjuster think it will cost to settle the claimant. There are two reserves for each claimant, one for loss payments and one for expense payments. The latter can be payments for police reports, field adjusters, lawyer fees, etc while loss payments are the actual damages (payments to body shops, medical payments, etc). When payments are made, the reserve amounts are reduced, until reaching zero. No more payments can be done then until the reserve is increased. Each adjuster have a limit to how large reserve he or she can set, higher reserve must be approved by a manager. Data storage When the claim system was first put in place, all reserves and payments werestored in the Notes database. They were then (manually) transferred into a backend system built in Visual FoxPro. But after a few years, a COM object (dsClaimLink) was developed and the Notes database is now sending all financial transaction into the backend, and retrieving financial information the same way when needed. Claim information is stored in the Notes database, as is claimant information. Some claimant information. a sub-set of the data stored in Notes,is sent to the backend as well. Original design Initially I built a large number of functions and subroutines, organized in different script libraries based on functionality.This actually worked really good, and the code was fairly easy to maintain, modify and expand. When the financial transactions were moved to the backend, I just had to modify the function GetAvailableAmount() to call the backend instead of looking up the amount in the Notes database. But it was still not very flexible, andI had some code that was duplicated in many places (most of it related to calling the COM object). So about two years ago, I started refactoring my code, both to make it faster and easier to maintain, by using object oriented Lotuscript. Example Beloware examples of the code in the script library Class.ClaimData class. This is not my exact production code, I have removed a number of lines to make the example more clear. The ClaimData class (described in next posting)contains an array of claimants, each of those an object. Each claimant object in turn contains an object containing the different amounts (loss reserve/loss payments, expense reserve/expense payments, recovery amount, etc). First, let's look at the AmountData object. Class AmountData Public lr As Currency ' Loss Reserve Public er As Currency ' Expense Reserve Public lp As Currency ' Loss Payments Public ep As Currency ' Expense Payments Public slp As Currency ' Supplemental Loss Payments Public sep As Currency…