On Dec 13, 2008, at 7:28 AM, Oliver Heger wrote:
There are of course configurations like MapConfiguration that are
not hierarchical by nature. The classes in the "flat" package
provide a hierarchical view on these classes. The idea is that when
a hierarchical node structure is needed, it is constructed on the
fly resulting in a root node and all properties stored in the
configuration as child nodes. (So there is only a single layer
hierarchy.)
But this is also experimental. I am not sure whether this is the way
to go or whether these configurations should be transformed into
true hierarchical configurations as is done by the
ConfigurationUtils.convertToHierarchical() method.
The problem I have is with the interface. Forcing applications to use
AbstractHierarchicalConfiguration as the "base" configuration object
they code to is wrong, IMO. Either they should use the Configuration
interface, which would need to include the hierarchical APIs such as
configurationAt, or they should use HierarchicalConfiguration, which
should be converted to an interface.
If the goal - which I think was a good one - is to make everything be
hierarchical, then Flat is just a special case where no subtrees
exist, i.e. the root of the hierarchy is a leaf node. The only thing
you really need to do in that case is prohibit adding child nodes.
So my recommendation would be to change the Configuration interface to
include the hierarchical methods.
Ralph
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@commons.apache.org
For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@commons.apache.org
