Four-Level Hierarchy

Home Overview Four-Level Hierarchy

MoStacks is built around an architecture that has four hierarchical levels:

MoStacks on Windows uses a color scheme with 4 distinct colors for the elements of the 4 levels. It is described in the chapter Color Scheme.

The stack is clearly the highest level of the hierarchy as the stack contains everything else.

The relation among the other three levels is not so clear-cut because it is complicated by the fact that cards contain fields and controls, but backgrounds do so as well. However, backgrounds in a way only contain field and control definitions, whereas the cards hold all the actual field values, and it's those values what's really important. A stack with no cards can have any number of field and control definitions in many backgrounds, but is more or less useless.

When actually using a stack the distinction between field definitions and field values is hardly necessary, and you can look at a MoStack as the said four-level hierarchy: The stack contains a number of backgrounds, each containing all the cards that have this background, and those cards contain fields and controls.

Certain things are very easy to change or manipulate in a MoStack because there is an inheritance mechanism based on the levels. E.g., if you change the stack font, every field on every card on every background changes the stack as well - except when some element down in the hierarchy carries a font definition of its own. You find the details about this important and powerful principle in the chapter Hierarchical Inheritance.