Hi all,
jumping in late...
Erik Hatcher wrote:
On Saturday, February 15, 2003, at 08:30 AM, Steve Cohen wrote:[snipping lots]
I know it isn't easy. A is required unless B, C and D or E is specified. Not fun. But necessary to any automated solution.
I think we should follow the "do not repeat yourself" and "one and only one representation" of validation rules as best we can in this situation. Here are a few invariants that we have to work within:
- Tasks can implement very complex and even dynamic validation rules that are well out of reach of any type of codification except within Java code itself.
- Its already the case that keeping the current static HTML and the tasks in sync is problematic.
- The look and feel of the current documentation is not flexible.
- Tools cannot work with Ant except via introspection or by humans coding things manually.
Back to the original point of do not repeat ourselves... if we try to invent some way of codifying such validation rules in @tags we'll end up with the same out of sync issue. I'd rather us err on the side of just using the English language (or perhaps localize it all somehow) to define these loose things. This duplicates the validation rules a little too, still, because they'll be in Java code and also in a text description. These two will be in very close proximity though.
With the disadvantage that the validation rules then can't be figured out by tools, which would be nice.
[snipping lots more]
-- Christopher Lenz /=/ cmlenz at gmx.de
