0 Replies Latest reply on Feb 22, 2008 5:05 AM by adrian.brock

    New MetaType annotations and changes

      While doing the ManagedObjects for the classloading metadata
      I've added a few "features" to the MetaType handling.

      1) ManagedObject should be inheritable

      When you have a base class handling metadata for different use cases
      and versions its a pain (and probably error prone) to have to add
      @ManagementObject to every one.

      So I've made the annotation inheritable.

      e.g. all these will pick up that this is a managed object from the base class
      @ManagementObject
      com.acme.BaseMetaData
      com.acme.BaseMetaDataV10 extends BaseMetaData
      com.acme.BaseMetaDataV20 extends BaseMetaDataV10
      com.acme.UseCase1MetaData extends BaseMetaData
      com.acme.UseCase2MetaData extends BaseMetaData

      2) Ignoring implementation details

      I had a case where I wanted to ignore some properties
      when creating CompositeMetaTypes/Values, which
      you can now do with an annotation

      public class MyClass
      {
      @CompositeValue(ignore=true)
      public void setImplementationDetail();
      }

      3) Choosing the property type exposed for management

      This is really a form of aliasing. Basically you have a generic property
      but for management purposes you want to expose an explicit type.

      e.g. My use case is:

      // Too generic to be useful for management so ignore
      @CompositeValue(ignore=true)
      public void setVersion(Object version) {}

      // This is how we want it exposed (it's really an alias of setVersion)
      @CompositeValue(name="version")
      public void setTheVersion(Version version) { setVersion(version); )

      4) Mapping of types in metatype

      I also didn't want to expose the Version as a CompositeType,
      e.g. major=1, minor=0, micro=0, qualifier=GA
      so like JAXB, I've allowed a mapper to specified using an annotation

      e.g. this exposes the Version type as a String "1.0.0.GA"

      @MetaMapping(VersionMetaMapper.class)
      public class Version implements Serializable, Comparable<Version>
      
      public class VersionMetaMapper extends MetaMapper<Version>
      {
       public Type mapToType()
       {
       return String.class;
       }
      
       public MetaValue createMetaValue(MetaType<?> metaType, Version object)
       {
       return SimpleValueSupport.wrap(object.toString());
       }
      
       public Version unwrapMetaValue(MetaValue metaValue)
       {
       if (SimpleMetaType.STRING.equals(metaValue.getMetaType()) == false)
       throw new IllegalArgumentException("Not a string: " + metaValue);
      
       SimpleValue<?> simple = (SimpleValue<?>) metaValue;
       String value = (String) simple.getValue();
       return Version.parseVersion(value);
       }
      


      The mapToType() is an "ease of use" thing. If you need a more complex type
      you should override getMetaType() instead.

      NOTE: This annotation is checked AFTER the MetaType/ValueBuilder
      stuff. So if somebody installs a specific builder for a type
      (e.g. using xml configuration), it will override this annotation.

      5) Bug fix

      Finally, I fixed a bug where the CompositeValue stuff had a couple places
      iterating over the keySet() (only the id properties) instead of the itemSet()
      (all properties). One of them wasn't really a bug, it was in the toString(), but it confused
      me ;-)