How to represent (class) data for GUI generation?
<p>I'm trying to make a small application that can edit the data files from an earlier project. I have access to that projects "data classes" (pretty dumb classes whose main purpose is to expose it's (public) member variables) that can read/write to the files. All I have to do is make a GUI that can edit the different member variables that each data class have (preferably without modifying the data class) and I'm trying to figure out how to do this so that it will be easy to adapt for future changes/additions.
(I don't feel like I can assume that all member variables should be editable, might only be a selection of them).</p>

<p>All the data can be converted to/from strings (numbers and text) and I don't see much problem in generating textboxes and/or something like a DataGridView in the GUI, but I'm not sure as to how I would like to represent the data needed to generate those.</p>

<p>My first thought was to use a list with all variables for each data class. With each row in the list containing the name+description of the variable (for the GUI), a pointer to the variable in the data-class and perhaps some form of validation-function for different variables.
Store that list in a class that inherits the original data-class (and that implements an interface/abstract-class for any specific GUI-related functions (load/save etc.)).</p>

<p>The thing that makes me worry about this solution is just that I feel like this should be a somewhat common problem and I'm a bit rusty when it comes to OO and this solution smells like something I'd write if I had to do it in C.</p>

<p>There might even be a handy language construct, design pattern or something that is suitable but I don't know what to search for.</p>

<p>Does this approach even seem sensible?</p>
