On 24/01/2016 12:40, mibo wrote:
Hi all,
During work on olingo-832 I realized that the „getEntities“ method in the
„org.apache.olingo.commons.api.data.EntityCollection“ return the list of
entities directly (instead of an unmodifiable List).
IMHO the best practice for List handling is to return only unmodifiable Lists
and offer a method like „addEntity(e:Entity)“ for modification to ensure the
encapsulation of the data (entities) within the collection object.
Well, this being considered a "bad practice" is quite controversial,
IMHO - just for an out-of-the-box example, this is the standard way how
collections are managed via JAXB.
As suggested modification the „getEntites“ should return a
„Collections.unmodifiableList(entities);“ and the EntityCollection gets a new
method „public void addEntity(Entity e) { entities.add(e); }“.
I know it is a little bit late to change the API that way, especially because
we used the „bad practice“ of „getEntities().add(..)“ a lot in the Oligo code
and tutorial.
Nevertheless I wanted to start a (short) discussion on the dev mailing list
what do you think about this and if we should change the code or not.
As said above, I don't believe this is a required change: intentionally,
the actual list is final and there is not setEntities() method, so I
don't see which bad practice could derive from this. The getEntities()
method is not returning an array, but a final collection that cannot be
replaced.
Regards.
--
Francesco Chicchiriccò
Tirasa - Open Source Excellence
http://www.tirasa.net/
Involved at The Apache Software Foundation:
member, Syncope PMC chair, Cocoon PMC, Olingo PMC, CXF committer
http://home.apache.org/~ilgrosso/
