Shackelford, John-Mason wrote:
Now that the subelement object has been populated, my class that implements
DynamicConfigurator needs to call a method on the subelement object.
Typically I would have an addXXX method and the subelements would be added
to a Vector, but since XXX corresponds to an element name unknown to me at
compile time, what do I do?
When using the createXXX methods, including the DynamicConfigurator one, you don't get a chance to call methods on the populated objects until execute(). This is just how it is, and how all core Ant tasks operate.
Design your implementation to account for this and all will be well.
I assume that the setDynamicAttribure method applies only to attributes of
the tag associated with the DynamicConfigurator, not its subelements. So its
not going to help.
Your subelements could also implement DynamicConfigurator, and their subelements, and so on. So, yes, it would help if you need to do super nested dynamic stuff.
<controller> I know I could achieve this by simply doing this and using
DynamicConfigurator with dynamic attributes for subelements, but this could
really make a mess since it would force one object to handle logic for lots
of commands.
You got a better design?
You're really going way out of the norm here for implementing Ant tasks, so either your on the bleeding edge or your out in left field! :)
DynamicConfigurator subelement just delegate all the work to an assortment of other classes that were mapped to the command name via a property file (thanks again Erik and Dominique for that insight).
Again, this has to do with plain old Java patterns and design. How you do it is up to you, and your hands are not really tied that much with Ant - its not the bottleneck here, I don't think. You've got ultra-dynamic capability.
Okay, now I am wavering. Should I abandon my initial approach or am I missing something that would make it easy to do? It does seem somewhat friendlier to the end user to ask them to type: <myCommand arg=""/> instead of <command name="myCommand" arg=""/> but perhaps it isn't doable.
I can't say. It is doable what you're asking for, but it sounds like you got much more going on than I can see or have time to digest. Its up to you to design it to work the way you want, but Ant gives you the capabilities. I've not seen a case you've presented where Ant was preventing you from doing something you wanted.
Erik
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