[Simple-support] Unmodifiable ElementList / ElementMap option

[Lumsdon, H. <Hug...@bl...>]

Hi Niall,

We've mentioned this idea before and you don't seem to express any opinion / interest.  However we'd love to be able to add an attribute to the ElementList and ElementMap annotations to indicate that these should be made immutable once an object has been de-serialized - i.e. wrapped using Collections.unmodifiableXXX.

The reason is we that we are caching most of our de-serialized Simple XML based beans - and as such don't want developers accidently trying to modify the objects thinking they're just updating a local copy.

We're currently doing this manually by creating unmodifiable wrappers to mirror each List or Map member variable.  However, whilst trivial, this adds a fair amount of code bloat and the possibility devs forget to wrap the underlying collection.  It would be so much tidier to just add a flag to the @ElementList or @ElementMap annotations and get the framework to handle it - and easier for us to search across the code base and make sure the flag is being set - i.e. along the lines of @ElementList(unmodifiable=true).

Please consider this as a future enhancement.

Thanks.






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