On Mon, Oct 22, 2012 at 11:33 AM, Marius Dumitru Florea
<[email protected]> wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 22, 2012 at 12:15 PM, Thomas Mortagne
> <[email protected]> wrote:
>> On Mon, Oct 22, 2012 at 10:36 AM, Marius Dumitru Florea
>> <[email protected]> wrote:
>>> Hi devs,
>>>
>>> Currently, the available XClass property types are hard-coded in
>>> MetaClass [1]. So in order to add a new property type you need to
>>> recompile the XWiki old core. I'd like to be able to create new
>>> property types using components so I created this branch [2] that
>>> includes the following important changes:
>>>
>>> (A) Use the value of the "classType" XML element from the XAR as a
>>> property type hint
>>>
>>> If you look at the XML export of an XClass you'll see that each
>>> property has a "classType" element whose content is the full name of
>>> the Java class used to implement that property type:
>>>
>>> <classType>com.xpn.xwiki.objects.classes.DBTreeListClass</classType>
>>>
>>> I think this is bad because:
>>> * it exposes an implementation detail
>>> * you cannot change the property type implementation without breaking
>>> backwards compatibility
>>>
>>> So I'm proposing to use the "classType" as a hint for the property
>>> type. Well, technically it will be a hint, but semantically it will
>>> specify the data type of the property value (e.g. String, Date,
>>> Number). For backwards compatibility, the existing property types will
>>> have hints that can be extracted from the value of the 'classType'
>>> (i.e. the full Java class name):
>>>
>>> String hint = 
>>> StringUtils.removeEnd(StringUtils.substringAfterLast(classType,
>>> "."), "Class");
>>>
>>> So both:
>>>
>>> <classType>com.xpn.xwiki.objects.classes.DBTreeListClass</classType>
>>> <classType>DBTreeList</classType>
>>>
>>> will point to the property type with hint "DBTreeList". Of course,
>>> when exporting an XClass with the new version of the core you'll only
>>> see the property type hint.
>>>
>>> The only issue with this approach is that XClasses exported with the
>>> new version will not work on an older version but this is acceptable
>>> IMO.
>>
>
>> I don't like breaking stuff too much especially when it's far from
>
> To be clear. This is not backwards compatibility. Are you sure that a
> XAR from 4.2 can be imported in XWiki 1.0 for instance? In other
> words, whenever we extended the XAR/XML format did we take care to
> keep the new XARs working on older versions of XWiki? If the answer is
> yes then I agree with your suggestions below. But for me it's enough
> to ensure that older XARs work with newer versions of XWiki, not the
> other way around.

I don't have any breaking change in mind except that obviously a 2.0
document is not going to be parsed properly with XWiki version that
only knows 1.0.

Anyway the point is not if it's going to fully work with XWiki 1.0. I
don't see any reason to break anything here and it's not even like
either of my suggestions was introducing any important complexity in
your proposal.

>
> Thanks,
> Marius
>
>> mandatory technically. We could either:
>> * keep theses old classType and have cleaner ones for new types. It's
>> not a big deal IMO, we are talking about oldcore API here and we will
>> have to introduce a new component API for this anyway with the new
>> model.
>> * or simply introduce a new field in the class which would fallback on
>> String hint = StringUtils.removeEnd(StringUtils.substringAfterLast(classType,
>> "."), "Class"); when it's not defined
>>
>>>
>>> (B) Add a PropertyClassProvider [3] role to retrieve an instance of a
>>> property class and to access its meta class
>>>
>>> Currently, in order to define a new property type you need to create
>>> two Java classes:
>>> * one extending PropertyMetaClass, to define the list of meta
>>> properties of the new property type (e.g. displayType, dateFormat,
>>> multiSelect, etc.)
>>> * one extending ProperyClass, to define setters and getters for the
>>> meta properties and maybe some custom display. This is the property
>>> type itself.
>>>
>>> So I added a PropertyClassProvider role that has two methods: one to
>>> get the meta class and one to get a new instance of the property type
>>> (e.g. when adding a property to an XClass). As a quick implementation
>>> I transformed all meta classes into implementations of this role.
>>> Finally, I modified MetaClass to lookup property class providers
>>> instead of hard-coding the property types.
>>>
>>> WDYT?
>>>
>>> Note that I've not added any CLIRR excludes and I tested my changes
>>> with the default, unchanged, class editor and it works fine.
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>> Marius
>>>
>>> [1] 
>>> https://github.com/xwiki/xwiki-platform/blob/xwiki-platform-4.2/xwiki-platform-core/xwiki-platform-oldcore/src/main/java/com/xpn/xwiki/objects/meta/MetaClass.java#L33
>>> [2] 
>>> https://github.com/xwiki/xwiki-platform/compare/feature-xclass-property-component
>>> [3] 
>>> https://github.com/xwiki/xwiki-platform/commit/fb9fcc7313ccb16f38c2d17dd7edf3a8e299a69b#diff-2
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> devs mailing list
>>> [email protected]
>>> http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Thomas Mortagne
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-- 
Thomas Mortagne
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