Support polymorphism for menu inheritance
-----------------------------------------
Key: MSITE-378
URL: http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/MSITE-378
Project: Maven 2.x Site Plugin
Issue Type: New Feature
Components: inheritance
Affects Versions: 2.0-beta-7
Reporter: Thorsten Möller
Inheritance of menus in an multimodule project environment does not work as
intuitively expected (as in OO languages). The following excerpts try to
illustrate this. Assume there is a root project R that has one module (project)
S. Both contain a site descriptor. Let the site descriptor for R be as follows:
{code:xml}
<project name="${project.name}">
<!-- ... -->
<body>
<menu name="Main">
<item name="Introduction" href="/index.html" />
<item name="News" href="/news.html" />
<item name="Overwrite" href="/documentation.html" />
</menu>
</body>
<!-- ... -->
</project>
{code}
And let the site descriptor for S be:
{code:xml}
<project name="${project.name}">
<!-- ... -->
<body>
<menu name="Main">
<item name="Introduction" href="/index.html" />
<item name="Overwrite" href="/overwrite.html" />
<item name="Added" href="/added.html" />
</menu>
</body>
<!-- ... -->
</project>
{code}
As I'm used to the way inheritance and polymorphism are defined in OO languages
such as Java, I would expect the following properties for the "Main" menu in S:
- item "Introduction" is overwritten in S but refers to the same index.html
file; of course, its path is relative to start directory of S
- item "News" is missing for S but will be inherited from R, thus, it will be
rendered to the site as in R
- item "Overwrite" is overwritten in S and refers now to overwrite.html
(instead of documentation.html as in R)
- item "Added" is new in S, thus, it will be rendered to the site in addition
Unfortunately, with the current implementation of the site plugin inheritance
is as follows:
- "Main" menu of R is inherited by S as-is, that is, all changes made to the
menu in S are not visible/rendered to the site.
I would like to propose to implement polymorphism regarding menu inheritance as
described above. In addition, I would like to propose a new boolean parameter
"inherited" (or "inherit") that can be added to menu items. Its semantics would
be equivalent to the "inherited" tag in pom.xml. In the following one example
for R:
{code:xml}
<project name="${project.name}">
<!-- ... -->
<body>
<menu name="Main">
<item name="Introduction" href="/index.html" />
<item name="News 1" href="/news1.html"
inherited="false"/>
<item name="News 2" href="/news2.html"
inherited="true"/>
<item name="Overwrite" href="/documentation.html" />
</menu>
</body>
<!-- ... -->
</project>
{code}
With this example only menu item "News 2" would appear in S because its
inheritance is not disabled, while menu item "News 1" appears only in R and not
in S because its inheritance was disabled (false). The default if the parameter
is missing should be "true".
Btw, the same extension should be made to the <menu ... > tag to allow to
enable or disable inheritance of menus entirely.
Regards,
Thorsten
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