Hi everyone, within the last weeks I spent some time on a project that is heavily relying on data being submitted by users of the system and setting up complex structures, users, groups and ACLs based on the operations performed by a user. I reallized that a lot of those things could be done by utilizing the SlingPostServlet and extending it by custom Postprocessors and custom operations. This worked out well but I realized some things that I'm not so happy with and would like to start off a discussion how the handling of Posts, and therefore the interactive part of Sling could be improved.
Here the points that I think are "discussabble": a) (non-Brainer) Postoperations and Postprocessors are rarely covered by documentation (Postprocessors are marked as TBD) this gives the impression of not being ready for productive usage so the gap should be closed b) Postoperations and Postprocessors are always defined and called global so it is up to the developer to check and skip processing (Blacklisting approach) which is errorprone if this manual check is not restrictive enough (can lead to subtle regressions in completely different areas of the app) - I'd propose to have a declarative approach that is a whitelistapproach based on path and propably even by resourceType (here comes the clash between posted resourceType and potentially already existing resourceType c) Sometimes data submitted should just be used as parameters for postprocessors or operations and not persisted. Using the dot-slash prefixing does give such options, but since the "./" notation acts as kind of a magic trigger of behaviour I'd prefer to have a way to annotate such fields (like name@ignore or @noPersistance) All in all the web is moving in a direction where almost no page is delivered with options to interact with the the webpage - so Sling should try to give developers the tools to do this wireing without having the dev to write boilerplatecode for those checks over and over again and enabling them to implement complete interactive userstories up to a certain point of complexity in a standardized way. WDYT? Best regards Dominik
