State Management

The sculptural model defines a context cards can access and manipulate. The QBN model also describes qualities as conditional statements testing against some values. In SimpleQBN, this is explicitly called State.

Creating a Deck also creates an internal State as a property called state. As the QualitySet of each Card needs access, this is passed to the Card method isAvailable() (which passes it internally to the check() method of QualitySet and finally to each Expression's own check() method) whenever the method draw() is called on a Deck. In other words, this checks all Cards against the current values of the State to see if they are available and can thus be drawn.

The State stores key-value pairs. These can be changed through the methods set(), exists(), delete(), get(), and size(). Commonly, however, the method set() can be used to add key-value pairs or update a value based on its key.

Usage Patterns

It is common to create a new Deck and then immediately change its state to add values before adding any Cards. While, technically, Cards can be added first and then State updated, if any Cards have qualities, there must be some values in the State to test against before the method draw() is used.