From a pragmatic point of view I'd not be against. The less syntaxes the
better, and I know a lot of users are not using minilang
for this reason. But it seems Adrian has already begin to work on the
Mini-language Overhaul...
Adrian should we not concentrate our efforts on reducing syntaxes in OFBiz? On the other hand I know replacing all minilang code in
OFBiz would be a long and "risky" task...
Jacques
From: "Jacopo Cappellato" <[email protected]>
I completely agree that having *one* set on Minilang operations for all the
actions (forms/screens/methods) is a good step forward.
My only doubt is about the effort required for the migration: I see an
opportunity to migrate all our applications code to Groovy
instead; at that point all OFBiz code will be either Java or Groovy and
Freemarker.
Jacopo
On Apr 5, 2012, at 1:45 AM, Adrian Crum wrote:
If we can agree on the mini-language syntax and get a good implementation, then
the next step would be to integrate it with the
screen widgets. Personally, I have always wanted the screen widget <actions>
element to behave the same way as the mini-language
<simple-method> element. That concept can be extended further to have
<simple-method> elements in the screen widget files
(https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/OFBIZ-4090).
-Adrian
On 4/4/2012 6:41 PM, Jacques Le Roux wrote:
Hi Adrian,
This looks like a great step forward. I really wonder though if we will still have many
possible syntaxes ("std minilang"
(should not vary with the place it's used), bsh, grooy, uel, etc.) or if it
will be more constrained
I guess you will follow David's suggestion on this?
What really bothers me with the simple-method stuff in OFBiz whenever I
use it is the inconsistency between the simple-method, screen actions,
form actions, etc, and the inconsistent handling of expressions and such
for field, from-field, value, etc attributes. Having everything use the
same XSD and having everything actually be a groovy expression (since it
is just transformed into a groovy script) made it much easier and less
frustrating to use.
I plenty agree with him. Moreover, I think we don't need many syntaxes, as long
as the one provided supersedes all the others.
On a long term, I can help to refactor current minilang code (which means also
screens and form actions of course).
Thanks
Jacques
From: "Adrian Crum" <[email protected]>
I think I have come up with a solution to fix the mini-language code:
mini-language auto-correction. If enabled, the element
models correct common mistakes and save the corrections to the original file.
This will still leave some warnings that will
need to be fixed manually.
-Adrian
On 4/3/2012 2:07 PM, Adrian Crum wrote:
I added parsing validation to the <set> element to see how it will work. The
validation can be enabled/disabled through a
property setting.
Just running the load-demo ant task generates hundreds of warnings - most of them are
caused by <set> attributes being used
incorrectly. On the positive side, a lot of nonsensical code is being revealed;
on the negative side, the log is filled with
warnings.
I'm not sure what I will do with this. If I commit the validation code, then we
will have a lot of work to do to clean up the
mini-language code.
-Adrian
On 3/8/2012 6:55 PM, Adrian Crum wrote:
Some more food for thought...
Looking through the Java code, I can see that there is no runtime validation
being performed. Granted, a decent XML editor
will warn you about required attributes and elements and such, but not everyone
uses that type of XML editor. Worse yet,
there is no way to know you've done something wrong - because mini-lang hides
the errors in verbose log statements. So, I
would like to add runtime validation. If the script is coded improperly, then
it should throw an exception.
Another change I would like to make is to remove default attribute values in
the schema. From my perspective, defaults should
be in the mini-language code. The wiki page has demonstrated to me how
difficult it is to understand what's going on when you
have to look through Java code, and then also look through the schema to see
what values it is supplying. Plus, it makes me
wonder how mini-language will behave when the server doesn't have access to the
schema.
Which brings up another point: Once the grammar has been cleaned up, we will
need a new schema. I think we need to start
giving our schemas version numbers so that XML editors and runtime XML
validation will work properly.
-Adrian
On 3/8/2012 6:19 PM, Jacopo Cappellato wrote:
On Mar 8, 2012, at 7:03 PM, Adrian Crum wrote:
B) instead of:
<fail-property resource="ErrorMessages" property="FooError" />
we could have
<fail-property property="ErrorMessages.FooError" />
Keep in mind that UEL would interpret FooError as an element of a Map called
ErrorMessages.
What you suggested can be done, but it will require more modifications to the
UEL integration - something I try to avoid
because it causes more problems than it solves. I recommend we keep the
resource attribute.
Np then, I was not even sure it was a good idea and if requires customizations
to uel then I agree it is not worth the
effort.
Thank you,
Jacopo
