[Witchcraft-developers] Advanced Search now works - please get latest, review and provide feedback

[Jess S. <sin...@gm...>]

Team,

  When you get a chance get the latest on kgauge, mdasupport and
oawclassic. As usual build mdasupport before running kgauge. I have merged
advanced search and basic search into one panel and now we have ranges for
integers, doubles , dates etc. Search also works for associations e.g. you
can search all exams created by a certain user. The view portion needs some
tweaking as the controls appear wiggly - pls bear with it for now.

Notable Points which I have decided to mention in this mail are - and I want
teammates to comment / provide feedback and maybe learn a few things from
them.

(i) Use of decorator design pattern very elegantly resolves Context related
issues and prevents us from falling into ugly if elseif else mess. When Jsf
components are rendered they could be in edit, search, view (and potentially
more in future ) context. Now the basic difference b/w edit context and
search context is that in search context you need all validations disabled
e.g. when editing/creating new an exam we need the min and max length of the
name field to be respected whereas this constraint should  not be applied
while creating a searchable field.

  Traditional brute force approach would be within the renderer we'd use an
if condition to see if the current context is search then dont generate the
validation code but this approach can't scale as number of contexts increase
and the code will become more and more difficult to mantain.

I have created a class
org.witchcraft.htmlinput.jsf.SearchRendererDecoratorwhich decorates an
InputComponent renderer and delegates the basic control
rendering to edit component renderer and returns empties for validation,
isRequired etc.

(ii)  I have created composition elements for ranges - dateRange.xhtml and
numberRange.xhtml in the WEB-INF folder and they work wonderfully well -
especially making code generation a breeze e.g usage :

<wc:numberRange rangeFieldName="rangeQuestions" label="Questions"
            backingBean="#{examCrudBacking}" type="integer" />

please go through these files as I want to build up on this approach and
want the team to have same level of comfort (or more ? ) as I do with
composition elements.