Change TOCTable and TOCLayer managers to a static approach.

[jorgelf]

In my opinion, both TOCTable and TOCLayer manager could work perfectly in a static approach, with no need to spend memory in storing a real object. When you want to retrieve a layer or table, you want to retrieve it among the ones opened at that moment, not from any previous state. Therefore, I think what we usually do in our code (we always create a new object and directly call the method onto it) doesn't make much sense and is a small waste of resources.
Maybe we could provide both options, both as an object (the only situation I think it could be useful is when you want to retrieve a series of layers/tables at the same point, as it will retrieve and traverse the windows only once) and as a static method, which will fit for most situations.

[fpuga]

I don't have a strong opinion, but i'm inclined to not make the change.

The actual code seems to be slow, as it is very used in the isEnabled, isVisible and these methods are called a lot of times. So each time they are called, all iwindows are looped looking for a view, then all layers are looped, ...

Maybe a more complex approach will be use a non-static object created at the beginning, and use the view/toc/layers listeners (not sure right now which is the listener to use) to be updated with the layer changes in the TOC, and caching the interesting information.

But, this approach is complex, and without measures, the principle of premature optimization is the root of all evil must be followed.

My previous reflection is because the performance benefits of make it static will be imperceptible. For sure it will be a bit more readable, but if that means change the actual code i prefer to leave it.

[jorgelf]

For avoiding any confussion, my suggestion is to have a static method that retrieves all the layers/tables, looking for the requested one and returning it in case it's found, with no static attributes for the class, just that method.
With that approach we wouldn't win much in terms of performance time, but our code wouldn't be leaving behind a useless object each time we want to retrieve a layer or table.
Also, code would look much better than the usual

new TOCLayerManager().getLayerByName(layerName);

[oandregal]

Maybe we can learn more to make a decision if we just write a performance test. I like the static approach for the sake of readability, though: they are just "finder" methods.