Class with no initial properties

Hey all,

3 classes have been defined in my project:

testClass which contain patients.

Patients are from the type patientClass, which contain an ID and data.

The data is from the type dataClass, which contain results.

If I want to make a test from the type testClass with a constructor:

test = testClass();

I don't want it to have any patients yet. Instead, patients should be added through a class method of testClass:

addPatient(idNumber) as such:

      test.addPatient('12345');

Same goes with data in patients and results in data.

Is this doable or am I missing the point here?

Maybe I should define the patients of testClass as a group. In that case I would have a group of patients (maybe an array of objects? I still think this is not really OOP-minded though) upon creation of the trial, which in turn can be empty (or which's size can be defined along with the constructor).

Any suggestions are much appreciated!

Answer 1

[Daniel Shub]

You can do this. When you define the patients property in testClass, just initialize it to be empty.

classdef testClass
  properties
    patients = patientClass.empty;
  end
  ...
end

[Bert]

Daniel, thanks again!

It looks like I've been asking the wrong questions (or the right ones, but in a wrong way), because I didn't come across this possibility while searching the documentation, this forum or google. Now that I know what to look for (i.e. empty property), I found it in the documentation as well!