On 3/7/07, Thilo Goetz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Let me make sure I'm following this. MyFlowController can not know what order analysis engines were specified in in the delegateAnalysisEngineSpecifiers tag, as those are order independent, right? You can then specify a fixedFlow constraint that the flow controller is free to follow or not, also correct?
Yes, that's right.
If that is right, it seems really weird. All we want is to pass a suggestion to the custom flow controller, in the absence of other information, choose this order. Calling that fixedFlow is more than just confusing, it's misleading. You should not be able to specify a fixedFlow with a custom flow controller, for why would you need one when you have a fixed flow?
I agree, it's weird. What are the other options? Giving the FC access to the order of declaration of the delegates would require some work, since that is parsed into a HashMap right now, and presented to the FC using the Map interface. We could allow a <customFlow> element. I'm just not sure that isn't also confusing - won't people ask how to use this element to specify how a custom flow works, not just as a "suggestion"? Or we could just deprecate the whole idea of a flow element and move towards using the flow controller's configuration parameters to do everything. A lot of custom flow controllers are going to need other parameters anyway. BTW, consider that the FixedFlowController is also a FlowController. It implements the FlowController interface and doesn't have any special powers that other flow controllers don't have. Same for the CapabilityLanguageFlowController. So they need to be able to access the <fixedFlow> or <capabilityLanguageFlow> elements.
On the other hand, I'm not even sure what this whole discussion is about, so maybe this is all besides the point ;-)
The "whole discussion" has migrated. I started it to discuss some changes to the FlowController API, but at this point we're discussing things that have been the way they are since v2.0. -Adam
