Re: MappingByReflection Re: [Hibernate-devel] Recent Changes and 0.9.5

[Paul S. <pau...@ne...>]

Gavin_King/Cirrus%CI...@ci... wrote:

[snip]

>>It is also impossible for MappingByReflection to see inside lists,
>>maps, and sets. Because they must be declared by their basic
>>collection interface, the reflection code has no clue what they
>>contain.
>>
> 
> Yeah, they should be left simply as stubs for the user to fill in.
> Thats cool, if this tool does 70% of the work (the tedious work),
> it already takes away 90% of the pain :)

Perhaps we could use a similar approach to Beans introspection here - 
guess based on what methods exist. In beans you have a convention for 
naming indexed properties, there might be a broad enough generalisation 
we could apply here ourselves for guessing what's in a collection.

e.g. for a List attribute blah, you might expect to find methods like 
addBlah( Foo ), removeBlah( Foo ) etc. and guess that blah contains Foo 
instances.

I don't know if this works in the wider world, but perhaps worth 
considering something similar. We generally used method names based on 
the underlying collection class, e.g. for a List there's add, remove, 
list. For maps it's put/get, etc.

Just an idea.

PaulS.