[Webmacro-devel] Hmmm, help info via BeanInfo anyone?

[Marc P. <ma...@an...>]

Hi guys,

It seems that Java's existing BeanInfo mechanism can be used to provide a 
reasonable amount of runtime help info on objects placed into a WM context.

Is there a specific reason why nobody is using it for this purpose?

With the WM webapp I'm working on, I could use BeanInfo to get the property 
names, their display names, and descriptions of each property and method 
(and method params). This would then be displayed in the "online help" 
pages of my webapp. "Helper" objects are a special case in my webapp - they 
are by design ANY java object, for simplicity's sake and so you can take 
any off-the-shelf Java class and use it. As such there is no way to get 
help info from them (my Plugins and Actions have methods that return help 
info to do with parameters and variables)

This means nothing more than using the bean Introspector class - and 
telling people who write helpers to implement a BeanInfo class for their 
bean.

I think this would be pretty powerful... and the code (simple wrappers 
around BeanInfo stuff to put into templates) would be of general use to WM 
users.


Any thoughts? I'm just wondering if nobody bothers with BeanInfo (except 
for visual component beans) for a specific reason.

-- 
Marc Palmer