MATLAB: Order of instantiation & Events

MATLABoop

Say I have a class A which has an Event "event1" which class B needs to listen for. I want class B to also be a property of class A, ie. I can instantiate obj = A(B). Ideally, in this process B would be set to listen for "event1" from A, but since Matlab builds B first, it does not know anything about A, and thus it has to be done effectively during the instantiation of A. The more complicated version is A(B(C)), where once again C needs to listen for "event1" in A, but is a property of B, which is a property of A.
In a nutshell I have an object A which is supplying the base data to a process which can involve anywhere from one to multiple filters, which is acted on and ultimately passed back to A… so the initial data needs to go to the bottom filter… the filters are defined by classes, in order to be portable and used in different situations..
The question, is there an efficient way to either define the classes or to instantiate the classes that would allow me to have the inner most nested class listen to the Event "event1" in the outer class without having to build a bunch of conditionals in the outer class instantiation function.

Best Answer

I really don't understand the point of objects listening to their own events. Why not invoke the dataupdate method of the child directly in the feeddata method?
With the current design, the child class has two roles: - filter the data, - incomplete management of a singly linked list, with dispatch to elements. While this is a possible design, I can't help but feel that the two should be handled by separate classes. This is the design I would adopt:
classdef DataProvider < handle   %your original outerclass. 
    properties
        data;
        filtermanager;
    end
    methods
        function this = DataProvider(data, filtermanager)
            this.data = data;
            this.child = child;
        end
        function filtereddata = feedData(this)
                filtereddata = this.filtermanager.filterdata(this.data);
        end
    end
end
classdef FilterManager < handle     %container for filters. Can be implemented as singly-linked list, doubly-linked list, vector of matlab.mixin.heterogeneous, or a plain cell array
    properties (SetAccess = private)
        filters = {};
    end
    methods
        function addfilter(this, filter)
           assert(isa(filter, 'Filter'), 'Only object derived from Filter class can be added);
           filters = [this.filters, filter];
        end
        %other methods to manage removals, ordering, etc. of filters
   end
   methods (Access = ?DataProvider)
        function filtereddata = filterdata(this, data)
            filtereddata = data;
            for filter = this.filters
               filtereddata = filter{1}.filterdata(filtereddata);
            end
        end
    end
end
classdef Filter < abstract
    methods (Abstract, Access = ?FilterManager)
        function filtereddata = filterdata(data);
    end
end
and an example filter:
classdef RatioFilter < Filter;
    properties
        ratio;
    end
    methods
        function this = RatioFilter(ratio);
            validateattributes(ratio, {'numeric'}, {'scalar'});
            this.ratio = ratio;
        end
    end
    methods (Access = ?FilterManager)
        function filtereddata = filterdata(data)
            filtereddata = data * this.ratio
        end
    end
end
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