Hi David,
Do you mean something like the following:
MyTopDTO {
int someField;
MySubDTO anotherDTO;
}
MySubDTO {
String someString;
}
Then you'd like to be able to do:
MyTopDTO dto = ...; // from somewhere
Object stringVal = converter.toTree(dto).valueAt(dto,
"anotherDTO/someString");
am I right?
Cheers,
David
On 16 August 2016 at 07:00, David Leangen <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Hi!
>
> The Converter service does a lot of introspection and parsing of the DTO
> data structure. In many cases, a DTO is a very simple object structure.
> However, it can also be a very complex structure, too.
>
> According to my understanding of the objectives of the Converter, one
> important goal is to be able to persist data. The idea is that the DTO
> describes the data, the whole data, and nothing but the data, so help me
> Uncle. Thus, it is the ideal way to ship the state of the system off to
> PersistenceLand.
>
> I can buy into this vision.
>
> If we do buy into this vision, then we may be missing out on a few great
> opportunities here. When data gets persisted, we often need to understand
> the relationships between the embedded objects. Or, we may want to be able
> to create an index on the data. These are a few of the reasons why we would
> want to have some kind of x-ray vision on the data structure. Since we
> already go through all the trouble of parsing the data structure in order
> to convert it, and since this is ~95% of the work, it would be really nice
> to provide access to this information in order to easily link in services
> that require this intimate knowledge. Otherwise, all the parsing would have
> to be done over and over again for each service.
>
> I believe that it would only take a few methods to be able to leverage all
> the parsing work done by the Converter. I can think of:
>
> DataTree Converter.toTree(DTO dto); // DataTre gives a tree view of the
> structure
> Object tree.valueAt(DTO dto, String path); // Dot-separated path value
> within the tree structure
> void tree.set(DTO dto, String path, Object value); // Set the value at
> the given location in the tree structure
> void process(DTO dto, Consumer<?> function); // Visit each node for some
> kind of processing
>
> Those are just some examples. Perhaps a new API would be necessary, but my
> main point here is that since we are going through all this work of
> implementing a parser, this is the IDEAL time to create this type of view
> on the data.
>
>
> wdyt?
>
> I can explain further the idea if you like. For now, I just wanted to get
> a quick feedback to see if there is any openness to this kind of thing.
>
>
> =David
>
>
>
