I'm developing a quite large (for me) ruby script for engineering calculations. The script creates a few objects that are interconnected in a hierarchical fashion.
For example one object (Inp) contains the input parameters for a set of simulations. Other objects (SimA, SimB, SimC) are used to actually perform the simulations and each of them may generate one or more output objects (OutA, OutB, OutC) that contain the results and produce the actual files used for the visualization or analysis by other objects and so on.
The first time I perform and complete all the simulations all the objects will be fully defined and I will have a series or files that represent the outputs for the user.
Now suppose that the user needs to change one of the attributes of Inp. Depending on which attribute has been modified some simulations will have to be re-run and some object OutX will be rendered invalid otherwise the consistency would be loss as the outputs would not correspond to the inputs anymore.
I would like to know whether there is a design pattern that would facilitate this process. Also I was wondering whether some sort of graph could be used to visually represents the various dependencies between objects in a clear way.
From what I have been reading (this question is a year old) I think that the Ruby Observable class could be used for this purpose. Every time a parent object changes, it should send a message to its children so that they can update their state.
Is this the recommended approach?
I hope this makes the question a bit clearer.
