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https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/THRIFT-529?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:all-tabpanel
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Bryan Duxbury updated THRIFT-529:
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    Fix Version/s: 0.4
                       (was: 0.2)

> Change generated constructors so that application code evolves better
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>                 Key: THRIFT-529
>                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/THRIFT-529
>             Project: Thrift
>          Issue Type: Improvement
>          Components: Compiler (Java)
>            Reporter: Nathan Marz
>            Assignee: Bryan Duxbury
>            Priority: Minor
>             Fix For: 0.4
>
>         Attachments: 529-revert.patch, thrift-529-v2.patch, thrift-529.patch
>
>
> The constructors generated by the Java compiler encourage code that breaks 
> when the thrift definition changes. For example, it is common to add an 
> optional field to a pre-existing schema, like:
> struct Activity {
>   1: required i32 id;
>   2: required i32 type;
>   3: optional i64 timestamp; //newly added
> }
> Any code that used the Activity(int, int) constructor will now break.
> One option to address this problem is to only generate empty constructors. 
> However, this makes it cumbersome to create new objects as a line of code is 
> needed to instantiate each field. A second option is to generate constructors 
> only for required fields. For example, to create an Activity with a 
> timestamp, the user would need to do the following:
> Activity a = new Acitivity(3,4);
> a.set_timestamp(timestamp);
> This gracefully handles the addition of optional fields. For the case of 
> adding a new required field, the constructors would break. Arguably this is 
> desired behavior since all the code would need to be updated anyway, and this 
> way you would be getting compile errors instead of runtime validation errors.

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