I was thinking about how we might add support for automatically converting strings to enum values, and I came up with something that might work (though I have not prototyped it). We might be able to use reflection to get the valueOf() method on a particular enum type, and then invoke it with the string value. We could potentially do this in BeanAdapter.coerce(), since all BXML type coercion ultimately flows through this method.
However, there's one minor issue with the concept. All of our enum conversion overloads currently call toUpperCase() on the value. We do this primarily so we can use lower case values in BXML (for readability). We'd have to do the same thing in coerce() in order to eliminate the overloads. In general, developers seem to adhere to the all caps/underscore convention when naming enum values, but it isn't strictly enforced. We'd therefore be imposing a slight limitation on the use of coerce(). I'm on the fence about it. BeanAdapter and BeanMonitor currently rely on other naming conventions (getter and setter methods, getXXXListeners(), etc.), so it's not that far-fetched. If the reflection approach works, is the case conversion a limitation that we can live with? G
