Re: [Tomahawk] Commit of component generation and 1.2 modules to trunk

[Leonardo Uribe]

Hi

I have made a wiki page for MyfaceBuilderPlugin here:

http://wiki.apache.org/myfaces/MyfacesBuilderPlugin

There is written the ideas present on the sample code, the comments on the
dev list and what I think that this plugin should looks like.

On Sat, Mar 15, 2008 at 4:11 PM, simon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

>
> In addition, the code in the myfaces-faces-plugin is really ugly. I
> cannot believe that the "class generation" is done like this:
>
>    if (property.isLiteralOnly() || property.isTagAttributeExcluded()){
>        //If the property is literal or is tagAttributeExcluded,
>        //the default value goes on the definition of the field
>        out.println("private " + propertyClass + propertyGenerics + " "
> +
>                fieldPropName + (def == null ? ";" : " = " + def +
> ";"));
>    }else{
>        //If is a primitive class, has a set field to check if this
>        //property is defined, so the default value goes on the
>        //getter method.
>        //If is a class, the same applies, because the check
>        //is against null
>        out.println("private " + propertyClass + propertyGenerics + " "
> +
>                fieldPropName + ";");
>    }
>
> This should really be template-based so that changes don't require
> understanding, modifying and re-releasing the build plugin.
>

I think (and it's my personal opinion) that templates for generate component
classes, tag classes and other files are harder to maintain with template
tools that simple java code. I have done a work long time ago with velocity
for generate hibernate code from a xml model. One small part could be seen
below:

    //Getter and Setter Methods for foreing key fields
#foreach( $field in $entity.getChild("fks").getChildren("field") )
#set ($name = $utils.lowerCase($field.getAttributeValue("target-table")))
#set ($type = $utils.capitalize($field.getAttributeValue("target-table")))
#set ($sql-name = $field.getAttributeValue("sql-name"))
#set ($target-col = $field.getAttributeValue("target-col"))
    @ManyToOne #if
($field.getAttributeValue("pk").equalsIgnoreCase("multiple"))(fetch =
FetchType.LAZY)#end

    @JoinColumn(name = "$sql-name",
            referencedColumnName = "$target-col"
#if ($field.getAttributeValue("pk").equalsIgnoreCase("multiple"))
            , nullable = false, insertable = false, updatable = false
#end
            )
    public $type get$utils.capitalize($name)(){
        return $name;
    }

    public void set$utils.capitalize($name)($type $name){
        this.$name = $name;
    }

#end

The problem to understand the template starts when the different options for
generate one part of code  starts to grow. What happen when a property is
literal? What happen when not? How to set a default value? Do we have to
cast or convert using valueOf to avoid compiler exception on jdk 1.4? The
same conditional should be written on java or velocity, the question is what
is more clean to write. I prefer *don't write the same code twice* if I
don't gain some in exchange.

regards

Leonardo Uribe