On 6/4/10 11:28 AM, Felix Knecht wrote:
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Do we leave it up to third party developers to take care that only
correct values are passed or do we have to take care that otherwise an
exception is thrown? To give an example from shared AttributUtils:
We never check if the object to clone is a String, we just presume that
any other developer using this class respects the convention given by
javadoc. Can we do so or should an exception be thrown in such cases?
This question will appear for sure for other methods as well.
/**
* Clone the value. An attribute value is supposed to be either a String
* or a byte array. If it's a String, then we just return it ( as String
* is immutable, we don't need to copy it). If it's a bu=yte array, we
* create a new byte array and copy the bytes into it.
*
* @param value The value to clone
* @return The cloned value
*/
public static Object cloneValue( Object value )
{
// First copy the value
Object newValue = null;
if ( value instanceof byte[] )
{
newValue = ( ( byte[] ) value ).clone();
}
else
{
newValue = value;
}
return newValue;
}
Hi Felix,
I think I replied by sending another mail (I wrote it 2 hours ago while
I ddn't have internet connection ...)
I think that this is exacty what 'assert' is good for :
public static Object cloneValue( Object value )
{
assert ( value != null );
assert ( ( value instanceof String ) || ( value instanceof byte[] ) )
// First copy the value
Object newValue = null;
...
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Regards,
Cordialement,
Emmanuel Lécharny
www.nextury.com
