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[Orekit Developers] Shouldn't Transform implement TimeStamped and TimeShiftable



Hi all,

I am currently working on the multi-threading issues, focusing on Frames as a first step forward. As I wanted to use the new TimeStampedCache to hold transforms between a frame and its parent frame, I considered changing Transform to directly implement TimeStamped. Of course, there are pros and cons about this change.

The pros are:

 - from a purely flight dynamics point of view, it does make sense.
   Transforms are specifically used to glue frames with each other,
   either directly for a frame with respect to its parent frame or
   indirectly by building a combined transform for converting coordinates
   between two frames which are not direct parent. Most of these transforms
   are valid only at a specific date, and only a few of them are independent
   of date.

 - whenever we use a transform, we either already have a date available
   or the transform is date independent, so it is really easy to link the
   transform with the date. I did it, and it took me less than one hour to
   propagate it throughtout the library, despite there are many many use
   of transforms (eclipse found 340 references to Transform)

 - I suppose this would simplify some user code, as for now users need to
   hold the date and the transform together by themselves, typically by
   having two parameters to any function that needs a transform, just to
   know the associated date

 - of course, if Transform implements TimeStamped, it is much simpler to
   use it with TimeStampedCache (otherwise, we would need to add an
   intermediate class to pack the date and the transform together)

 - if Transform implements TimeStamped, it would be easy to have it also
   implement TimeShiftable and have a new possibility to compute simply
   and very fast small time shifts in frames transforms without recomputing
   every individual transform throughout the frames tree (this is used for
   example to implement the shift method in the Attitude class, so the code
   which exist in the Attitude class could be moved to the Transform class)

The cons are:

 - It is a backward incompatible change (so if we want to do this, we have
   to do this now as 6.0 is a major release where incompatible changes are
   allowed, which will not be possible with later 6.1 minor release)

 - All Transform constructors must be changed to add the date (this is in
   fact quite simple, as it introduce compilation errors that IDE like
   Eclipse spot immediately so it is guaranteed no call will be missed)

 - The object holds one more field, so it is larger. I'm not sure this is
   really a problem, as Transforms are often transient objects which are not
   used or serialized in large numbers

I have made the change to check if everything was simple, and indeed it was. One unexpected change however was about combining two Transform instances to build a new one. The current constructor takes two arguments:

  public Transform(Transform first, final Transform second) {
    ...
  }

I have decided to add a date parameter also for this constructor, and to *ignore* the dates of the two raw transform. The rationale behind this choice was that sometimes we do combine transforms built at different times. A typical example is when doing some coordinates conversion involving one frame which is fixed with respect to its parent like EME2000 with respect to GCRF or a topocentric frame with respect to the body frame or some sensor frame with respect to the spacecraft body frame. The fixed transform is built as an arbitrary constant date (for example AbsoluteDate.J2000_EPOCH) and never changed. When this transform is combined with the next transform in the tree, the other transform depends on date and will not be AbsoluteDate.J2000_EPOCH. Another use case is when combining transform for interpolating, such computation involves combining the transform at date t + h with the inverse of the transform at date t to evaluate the evolution between the two dates. Both cases show combining transforms at different dates should be allowed without errors. It seems impossible to guess automatically which date to use. So I added the parameter and let the caller specify the date of the new transform, which may or may not be one of the underlying transforms date.

I have not committed the change yet. What do you think about it ?

Luc

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