>When I thought about it some more it seemed to me that we needed a couple of
>extra methods on the QueryDictionary in addition to what we discussed
>earlier.
I came to the same conclusion myself this morning. Here's what I came up with.
It's similar to what you proposed, but may be slightly more consistent with
Pivot's existing collection APIs. It basically merges the Dictionary and
Sequence interfaces:
public interface QueryDictionary
extends Dictionary<String, String>, Iterable<String> {
public String get(String key); // from Dictionary
public String get(String key, int index); // new
public String put(String key, String value); // from Dictionary
public int add(String key, String value); // new
public void insert(String key, String value, int index); // new
public String remove(String key); // from Dictionary
public String remove(String key, int index); // new
public void clear(); // new
public boolean containsKey(String key); // from Dictionary
public boolean isEmpty(); // from Dictionary
public int getLength(String key); // new
}
>It also seemed necessary to clarify what the implications of this
>interface have on the Dictionary that it implements. Namely, how the #put
>and #get methods behave based on the fact that the backing storage for
>values is now a sequence. (Hope that makes sense)
Agreed. I think the behavior you documented for these methods is what
developers would expect.
>Also, while this is an interface the implementation details are pretty much
>tied down, so shouldn't this be a concrete class that the other classes
>extend instead? They are marked as final so it isn't as though any further
>inheritence would be possible.
Actually, I'm thinking it could just be a concrete class backed by an instance
of HashMap<String, ArrayList<String>>. We could try to enforce read-only access
for the response data if we wanted to, but right now I'm leaning towards
keeping it simple and making it read/write. We'd end up with three instances of
HashMap<String, ArrayList<String>> and three corresponding instances of
QueryDictionary to wrap them.
Thoughts?
Greg
