Hi all,
A few issues have popped up recently related to how maps (in particular
the metadata map for catalog objects) is persisted/depersisted. The
latest issue revolves around someone trying ot configure a feature type
via rest.
The issue is that in an attempt to make xstream less verbose, i made it
so that someone trying to upload map data with rest can do this:
<map>
<key1>value1</key1>
<key2>value2</key2>
...
</map>
As opposed to the xstream default:
<map>
<entry>
<string>key1</string>
<string>value1</string>
</entry>
<entry>
<string>key2</string>
<string>value2</string>
</entry>
</map>
However this has caused some issues. The main issue is that type
information is lost. This pops up in a couple of places:
* when a feature is persisted in geoserver, and then read back in again
it is always read back in as a string.
* when a feature type is uploaded via rest, the values in the metadata
map are of type string.
The end result is the same, ClassClassException for code that assumes
type information about the metadata map.
The quick solution for now has been to replace this:
(Integer) featureType.getMetadata().get( "foo" );
with:
Converters.convert( featureType.getMetadata().get( "foo" ), Integer.class );
The longer term solution is to amend the xstream persistence a bit so
that type information is not lost. This is however a bit tricky though.
And probably won't fix every REST case.
So I am wondering. What do people think about making it practice that
whenever accessing data from a metadata map, that a converter be used.
The downside of course is that we have to update a bunch of code, and
its one more thing to remember. The upside is that things are a bit more
flexible and lenient. Which might be a big benefit in the future if the
metadata map is used to store more and different kinds of stuff.
Anyways, curious to hear peoples thoughts on this.
-Justin
--
Justin Deoliveira
OpenGeo - http://opengeo.org
Enterprise support for open source geospatial.
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