Hi,
I have updated the Trunk for some minor changes to bring in support for
properties. I 'property' iTest is also back fully functional. With this
check it should be possible to have components configured with simple and
complex properties either single valued or many valued. The 'source' and
'file' options are also working from what I tested with the iTest. An
assumption about simple type many values is that if there are many values of
a simple type then they are all provided with spaces separating each value.
For Strings, each string needs to be enclosed within a double quote.
Examples of a many valued 'float' type property and 'string' type property
are...
<property name="manyProp1" many="true">
12.34 56.78 90.12 34.56
</property>
<property name="manyProp2" many="true">
"Apache" "Tuscany" "Java" "SCA"
</property>
The current support for properties does not work for Components whose
implementation is a Composite. There are some issues that I see with doing
this which I'll start in a new thread.
At the present moment I have included the 'databinding' module as a
dependency into the implementation-java-runtime. I have created the
DBRegistry, the Transformation Registry and have explicitly registered the
DOM2JavaBeansTransformer. I have left out the other transformers as I guess
this is going to change with these registries being accessible from the
extentions point registry. When I figure that out, it would probably bring
in the whole suite of transformers.
With this implementation I also have a few observations over which I request
comments: -
- With respect to the attribute 'many' it is 'false' by default and is also
optional. Meaning if a property definition does not mentioned this
attribute then it is taken as 'false'. Given this, if a componentType has a
property that has many='true' then the component that uses this
componentType MUST state many='true' if it also wished to have the property
as many valued. If the component does not mention this attribute, then the
'many' attribute assumes its default value which is 'false' and prevents the
use of many values in the property definition. This could quite be a
surprise if the 'many' attribute is left out of the Component with the
assumption that it will inherit whatever is defined in the underlying
componentType. So in a nutshell, if many values are going to be used then
the Property Defn. in the Component MUST specify many='true' - is this ok ?
- PropertyValues can also be loaded from a file by mentioning the location
of the file in the 'file' attribute. What is the classloader to be used
when loading this file? Must the ContributionService be used? At the
present moment I am using TCCL.
- When a property has 'source' and 'file' defined, the specs says that
'source' takes precedence over file. Now what if 'source' is provided and
also a value is provided. Which takes precedence? Right now the 'source'
is taking precedence.
Thanks for reading upto this point :)
- Venkat
