Hi All,
First of all, thnx for all the hard work put in the Tiles2 development.
It's good to see old, good library with refreshed API.
Speaking about the API: I was trying to add a new attribute type to Tiles2
and I've found that this is not a trivial task? I mean, I can find all the
places to tweak, but I'm a little bit scared of changing
BasicTilesContainer. For me, the problems comes from the:
public void render(Attribute attr, Writer writer, Object... requestItems)
method. More specifically, this switch statement is kind of problematic:
switch (type) {
case OBJECT:
throw new TilesException(
"Cannot insert an attribute of 'object' type");
case STRING:
writer.write(attr.getValue().toString());
break;
case DEFINITION:
render(request, attr.getValue().toString());
break;
case TEMPLATE:
request.dispatch(attr.getValue().toString());
break;
default: // should not happen
throw new TilesException(
"Unrecognized type for attribute value "
+ attr.getValue());
}
It looks like I would need to change the AttributeType enum, definitions
reader and the BasicTilesContainer?
I was wondering if it would be possible to change an implementation in the
way that each attribute is responsible for rendering itself. I know this
is quite a change, but I was wondering if such a design was ever
considered. Sorry if I'm blind and can't see obvious problems with such a
design?. I would be really grateful for any feedback. Basically, my goal
is to add a new type of attribute and not to rewrite to much chunks of
Tiles2.
Thnx,
Pawel
