dolfin team mailing list archive

[Johan Jansson <johanjan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Feb 16, 2006 at 11:40:19AM -0600, Anders Logg wrote:
> Some more thoughts: Maybe we should keep the FiniteElement interface
> as simple as possible and just have simple inheritance from a protocol
> class in the same way as for BilinearForm and LinearForm? These three
> classes are somewhat special and we can't really store them to an XML
> file.
> 
> The only thing we can store is some kind of identification, so it
> seems we need a new class, something like FiniteElementIdentifier or
> FiniteElementSpecification (name suggestions welcome) that we can
> read/write to file. That would make it possible to do
> 
>   FiniteElementSpecification specification;
>   file >> specification;
>   FiniteElement* element = FiniteElement::makeElement(specification);
> 
> This would mainly be used when reading/writing functions and mostly
> hidden so it is somewhat special.
> 
> Any thoughts?
> 
> /Anders
> 

This is true, the finite element is actually not read from the
file. FiniteElementSpecification is probably the better
choice. FiniteElementIdentifier sounds like it could be an index or
serial number or something like that.

  Johan