Hi, all,
As it currently stands, PropertyUtils doesn't support DynaBeans for a number of its methods. It doesn't make much sense to return PropertyDescriptors for DynaBeans, but it's no great pain to use WrapDynaClass on an ordinary class and thereby be able to introspect either regular beans or DynaBeans using the same interface. To support this, I'd like to add a method with the signature:
DynaProperty[] getDynaProperties(Object bean)
to PropertyUtilsBean, with a corresponding static method in PropertyUtils.
Now, one of the other advantages of using PropertyUtilsBean is that it caches the introspected data. Conceivably, this would also be a useful feature for the getDynaProperties method. However, here we have a problem: since DynaClass doesn't have any way to enforce that its implementations implement HashCode, there's no way to use the same map caching strategy as is used for the PropertyDescriptors. This illustrates a larger issue, which is that DynaClass objects aren't singletons like Class objects are.
To resolve this, I propose adding an AbstractDynaClass base class that implements hashCode() and equals() based upon the public methods available in DynaClass. This way, even if DynaClasses aren't singletons, they can be used for hash keys. It might be also useful to implement a registry for DynaClasses in this abstract class to provide singleton-like functionality. Existing DynaClass implementations would be modified to extend AbstractDynaClass.
Any thoughts?
Kris
-- ===================================================== Kris Nuttycombe Associate Scientist Geospatial Data Services Group CIRES, National Geophysical Data Center/NOAA (303) 497-6337 [EMAIL PROTECTED] =====================================================
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