A 'BXMLExpander' tool is another possibility. It would take an input BXML file, process each Transformable, expand it into BXML, and then output to a new file.
For those of you familiar with the fantastic Project Lombok, this would be equivalent to the 'delombok' tool. http://projectlombok.org/ http://projectlombok.org/features/delombok.html In a simple example this BXML fragment ... <PasswordInput> <wtk:TextInput tooltipText="Using supplied TextInput" text="secret" /> </PasswordInput> ... would be expanded to <TextInput tooltipText="Using supplied TextInput" text="secret" password="true" prompt="Enter password" /> Such a tool might require an additional change to BXML serializer to support this scenario PasswordDecorator sets properties of the 'textInput' Component, but it was already created in a previous XML element. I don't think it is currently possible to represent this in BXML (as there is no real use-case to support it). bxml:reference adds/sets the referenced object, but this scenario would require just dereferencing before modifying the object in some way. <bxml:define> <TextInput bxml:id="textInput" /> </bxml:define> <!-- Tweak any TextInput's properties to make it into a 'password' style component --> <PasswordDecorator target="$textInput" /> Combining a number of ideas from before, this change allows the following workflow - An offshore design team in country X could rapidly prototype a Pivot GUI - built using their in house library of custom, powerful Transformables - (which are all in the native language of country X) - without having any knowledge of Pivot (just using a simple BXML viewer app) - and then 'expand' the resulting BXML files to generate standard BXML files which reference only org.apache.pivot.wtk.* classes. - without having to reveal their highly prized Transformables to the client or their competitors All of the above could be achieved by the offshore team if it made this proposed change to BXMLSerializer themselves. However if it was officially supported (ie, bundled into the Pivot jars), they would be able to share their library of Transformables with the Pivot community in a similar way to how css stylesheets, blog themes, or application skins are shared. Chris
