ECL Container Objects

Several of the HACL classes act as containers of other objects. For example, the ECLSession object contains an instance of the ECLPS, ECLOIA, ECLWinMetrics, and ECLXfer objects. Containers provide methods to return a pointer to the contained object. For example, the ECLSession object has a GetOIA method, which returns a pointer to an OIA object. Contained objects are not implemented as public members of the container’s class, but rather are accessed only through methods.

For performance or other reasons, the contained objects may or may not be created when the container object is created. The class implementation may choose to defer construction of the contained objects until the first time the application requests a pointer to them. The application should not assume that contained objects are created at the same time as the container. For example, an instance of the ECLPS object may not be constructed when an ECLSession object is constructed. Instead, the ECLSession class may delay the construction of the ECLPS object until the first time the GetPS method is called.

When a container class is destroyed, all the contained instances are also destroyed. Any pointers that have been returned to the application become invalid and must not be used.