[Springframework-developer] Improving spring binding

[Steven D. <ste...@gm...>]

Hi,

After reading Keith's blog entry on dynamic method invocation on
actions in SWF and passing arguments from the flow and request scope
I've been hitting a number of problem with the implementations in
spring binding.

The first problem has to do with the conversion package.
DefaultConversionService does not take into account assignable
classes. If you specify for example java.util.Map as target class and
java.util.HashMap is the source class conversion will fail with a
message saying no conversion is found from HashMap to Map. The obvious
solution to me seems to test if the target class is assignable to the
source class and do no conversion in that case.

Specifying no target type in the Argument class can circumvent this
problem. A second problem however arises when searching for a method
to execute. If your method for example is "execute(Map)" and the
argument value is java.util.HashMap the method lookup will fail since
the method signature and argument types to not match (Map !=3D HashMap).
The obvious solution to me seems to search for methods whose arguments
are assignable by the argument types. This again implicates a
significant change in key spring binding classes that probably should
be discussed.

Steven