Using a ColumnNumber Attribute

When presenting the chosen document design, I discussed some alternative approaches for naming the column Elements. Let's look now at how the code would change if we used a generic Element name (Column) and an Attribute indicating the column number (that is, approach 2, instead of my chosen ColumnXX approach 3).

In the CSVRowWriter write method we replace the call to get the column's NodeName and parse the ColumnXX name to get the number with a single call to the Element Node's getAttribute method. This is shown in the pseudocode snippet below.

Column Number <- call Column Element's getAttribute to get
  value of ColumnNumber Attribute

Intuitively, this seems as if it would be a simpler approach since we would save one line of pseudocode and a few lines in Java and C++. From a programmer's perspective your intuition would be right. However, as noted earlier there are perspectives to consider other than just that of the person doing the coding. We need to consider the impact on the end users, and this approach makes their jobs harder. When given a choice, I'll always make things easier for the end user rather than the programmer.