[Springframework-developer] TypedMapFactory?

[Peter B. <pet...@ho...>]

Hello.

Would it make sense to add key-class and value-class attributes to the
<map> element, and feed the strings in the key/value elements (or
attributes) to the appropriate PropertyEditor, to allow setting key and
value of the correct class when using maps with generics?

For example, consider this example:

public Map<Locale, String> getHeadsOfState() { ... }

configured like this:

<property name="headsOfState">
  <map key-class="java.util.Locale" value-class="java.lang.String">
    <entry key="en_US" value="George W. Bush"/>
    <entry key="en_GB" value="Tony Blair"/>
    <entry key="sv_SE" value="G&ouml;ran Persson"/>
  </map>
</property>

I've glanced at modifying the xml parsing and subclassing or modifying
MapFactoryBean, but I thought I'd ask here first if it's possible to do
this any other way, or if it's a bad idea altogether. 

What do you think?

/Peter Backlund