RE: [FormProc-developer] Object Population and Validation (was: Validation by type)

[Nick B. <ni...@co...>]

Anthony Wrote:

> Comments inline.
> 
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: for...@li... 
>> [mailto:for...@li...] On 
>> Behalf Of Nick Bauman
>> Sent: Wednesday, January 23, 2002 11:37 AM
>> To: for...@li...
>> Subject: [FormProc-developer] Object Population and 
>> Validation (was: Validation by type)
>> 
>> 
>> I understand. That's great, I think it's a good idea. I was making an 
>> assumption that these are 2 different goals that s/b 
>> decoupled. It is, 
>> however, not wrong to couple them.
> 
> Good, glad we agree. :-)
> 
>> 
>> Thinking aloud: 
>> 
>> For myself, and maybe I need some religion on this one, but I 
>> personally 
>> don't like frameworks that make me change my objects to fit 
>> them better, 
>> or have to make discriptors of my objects that are external 
>> to them which 
>> make it possible for a framework to use them. 
> 
> The good news is that you don't have to change your objects to work
> with FormProc.  The data population is not required.  You do not have
> to specify write methods and if a setXXX() method is not found then
> that field will be skipped (validation will still occur though).

Perfect.
 
>> For me to 
>> accept this, I'm 
>> going to take a long hard look before leaping. This is why I 
>> like the idea 
>> of decoupling the data validation from the object population. 
>> Maybe I want 
>> to plug in my own object population strategy? 
> 
> Being able to plug in an object population strategy is not a bad idea.
> If you ever find that you do need to do this then let me know and I
> will work on making the population part of FormProc pluggable.  One
> thing to note is that FormProc attempts to follow the JavaBeans
> standards when populating objects since it is the accepted standard for
> working with unknown components at runtime.

Sure, JavaBeans is what I assumed. Principle of Least Astonishment.
 
>> For this a peer 
>> interface is 
>> all that's needed. (If you've guessed that I dislike CORBA 
>> for this reason 
>> you're partially right, but only in particular when everyone 
>> is speaking 
>> Java, but that's another argument) 
>> 
>> Also, Anthony, the object population portion has taken root in your 
>> design. Is that a good thing? Maybe it is, but it makes me think. 
> 
> I wouldn't say that it has taken root, rather it is the most common way
> that people think about forms (AFAICT).  Even if FormProc was not
> designed to populate objects I would still maintain the one-to-one
> relationship between form widgets and FormElements in FormProc.

I was being too obtuse by the phrase "taken root", my fault. Specifically, 
and not to belabor the point, I was implying "the subsystem of object 
population is influencing the (potentially unrelated) data validation 
subsystem". And there's nothing wrong with that, it's just something to 
consider. :-)

> -Anthony
> 

-- 
Nick Bauman 
- A Fella That Thinks FormProc is awesome