Hello;
As you may know, WebObjects/EOF has the protocol;
NSValidation
Specifically, this protocol implements the following two methods;
Object validateTakeValueForKeyPath(Object value, String keyPath)
Object validateValueForKey(Object value, String key)
The effect is that when a client tries to write a property "foo", it will
ultimately try to invoke;
Object validateFoo(Object value) throws NSValidation.ValidationException
...before...
setFoo(Object value)
...in order to either "repair" the value before assigning or to throw an
exception. This is very handy from the user-interface perspective. For each
attribute of an entity, this technique is also automatically used in the case
of "validateForSave()" which means that aside from inter-attribute validation,
per-attribute validations can be implemented just once.
To provide this same behaviour to Cayenne, I would like to put forward the idea
to implement something similar;
validatedWriteProperty(ValidationResult vr, String propName, Object
value)
validatedWriteNestedProperty(ValidationResult vr, String propName,
Object value)
This would use (cached) reflection to look for a "validate" method and fire
that before writing the property. For each attribute of a DataObject's entity,
these methods would be fired from;
void validateForSave(ValidationResult validationResult)
Does this make sense in the context of Cayenne?
Regards;
___
Andrew Lindesay
www.lindesay.co.nz
