Hey guys,
I've been thinking some more about this.
I ran into a big problem though with annotations and submissions,
pointed out to me by JR. The way it's currently setup is that
parameters, submission beans, files are added to the last
submission that was declared. This can either by through class-
level @Submission annotations, or by method-level
@SubmissionHandler annotations. When using property setter
annotations for the parameters, submission beans and files, using
the @SubmissionHandler annotation is probably much more convenient.
Sadly though it turns out that Java reflection isn't able to
provide you with methods of a class in a predictable order. Hence,
the order of the methods in Class.getDeclaredMethods can be
different from your class layout, and it can even change from JDK
to JDK. This totally invalidates the usefulness of 'adding to last
declared submission' since you're never sure what the 'last
submission is'. When you work with one submission, you can still
declare it as a class level annotation, however when using multiple
submissions, there seems to be no way to easily use annotations on
property setters for the data structure of the submissions.
I don't really know what the 'best' solution is. Without resorting
to hacks, I can only come up with the introduction of the
submission name for each parameter, submission bean and file
property setter. I don't like that much though. When resorting to
hacks, it should be possible to make RIFE actually inspect the
element class bytecode and find all the methods names in the order
that they were compiled. This can then be used to iterate over them
when processing the annotations. However, I'm not sure what the
contract is for the method order in bytecode. It might not even be
the same as the method order in source.
Any thoughts on this?
A trivial but effective solution might be to add a new annotation:
"Position". This would take an integer argument to indicate the order
of methods. The methods that have this annotation will be processed
before those that don't have it, and according to the numeric order
that has been specified.
What do you guys think about this?
--
Geert Bevin
Uwyn "Use what you need" - http://uwyn.com
RIFE Java application framework - http://rifers.org
Music and words - http://gbevin.com
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