Strategy&word documents files

Question

i have 3 questions
1. the strategy as i understand is a common interface being implemented by more than one class .. and there is a class (which is the strategy) that will instanciate one object of one of those classes (that implement the interface) everytime called.. did i understand the strategy right ??
2. what is a composit .. can someone explain it with an easy example please ?
3. i wrote a document using microsoft word as my user manual, it contains links within the document.. how can i view it in java with maintaining the links? can i run the MS word with the file as a parameter (if so then how?) or is there any better way ?
thanks for helping

Answer 1

Hello,
1) Your understanding of strategy is not entirely correct. Though, operationally you are accurate in saying what you have. A strategy is a concept, that encapsulates an algorithm i.e. logic. Strategy is used in many circumstances, one example is when we want the logic applicable on a data set to vary conditionally (as you may have observed, a simple if..else could be used in this situation, however, that is the point of using a strategy, encapsulating the concern of varying logic).
2) A composit, as the name suggests, is an entity which is composed of many other entities. You can view composit being constructed of smaller entities with various functions, whose total behavior is the composits behavior. It is mostly used when we want to combine together behavior of many concerns together and is most often used in combination with another patter, the "Deligate", where each of the smaller entities take responsibility to do a specific part of the Composits total behavior (this behavior should not be confused witha Proxy or Facade :D)
3) I do not know of a direct way (without going into the encoding of MSWord i.e. RTF) to do this, what I can suggest, however, is to convert the document into an HTML and view it from a Java application (the conversion can be done by MSWord quite easily).
Hope this helps.
Ironluca