[splitting annotations discussion in its own thread]
> On Jan 8, 2017, at 10:40 AM, Andrus Adamchik <and...@objectstyle.org> wrote:
>
>> On Jan 8, 2017, at 1:12 AM, Michael Gentry <blackn...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> We had looked at overriding getters/setters for annotations, but we didn't
>> want to do that 1000s of times, so we gave up.
>> I see value in the
>> superclass being able to have annotations along with JavaDocs for various
>> attributes and relationships, plus the class itself. The superclass is
>> essentially maintained outside of the IDE currently, anyway (you may look
>> at the code, but you don't edit it), so I don't think it'll be too bad.
> But how does this save us work creating annotations? If you had to override
> 1000's of methods, then you will have to create 1000's of annotations in the
> Modeler as well to achieve the same effect. The only way to cut down on the
> number of (repeating) annotations is if they are are all applied to the same
> properties of different entities. Then they can be moved to a separate
> interface (or a superclass common to all entities), all outside the Modeler
> and within the IDE.
More on why annotations being on the IDE side is important ... Annotations do
not have to be trivial. They may have a bunch of references to other code. So
taking them out of reach of the IDE refactoring is really inconvenient. E.g.:
@MyA {
handler = com.foo.MyHandler,
types = {"a", "b", "c"},
name = "foo"
}
class MyClass {}
So here if you say rename "MyHandler", you have a good chance of missing it in
the XML. We've seen this problem repeatedly with Listener classes mapped in the
Modeler, which led us to remove Listener functionality from the Modeler
completely. This generally made me extremely wary of keeping non-ORM pieces of
code in the XML.
So perhaps there's another solution for annotations? Such as replacing the
"generation gap" pattern in the future versions with smarter "merging" code
generators (e.g. using @javax.annotation.Generated to tell the code generated
by us from the code created by the user).
Andrus
