[Pojomatic-users] Properties and inheritance

[Chris H. <han...@gm...>]

I've always thought the way properties are handled with regard to
inheritance is a bit clunky. Right now, a class has no choice but to
inherit all properties from all superclasses, leading to duplicate
properties in some cases (e.g. when @Property accessors are
overridden). The following ideas are inspired by {@inheritDoc}.

One possible alternative would be that properties are never inherited
unless explicitly requested via a class-level @InheritProperties
annotation. That would give the author of any given class full control
over the properties, but it would mean that inherited hashCode(),
equals(Object), and toString() methods would behave
counter-intuitively by default (i.e. without this annotation).

Another alternative, which seems more promising, would be that
properties are inherited by default (as now), but there would be some
way to "switch off" property inheritance (e.g.
@AutoProperty(inheritance=None) or @DoNotInheritProperties on the
class). Subclasses would still have a reasonable default behavior with
the extra control.

Thoughts?

-Chris