FreeMarker hash lookup using object graph notation - struts2

I have 2 variables in parameters map populated from a struts2 tag, as follows:
obj - A java object with various child objects. It can be treated as a hash in freemarker template.
displayProperty - A string containing property name inside the obj. The name can be object graph containing multiple levels of drill down.
I want to display the given property of the obj using freemarker template. For example if displayProperty is entity.name, then it should essentially print value of obj.entity.name.
My freemarker template is ${obj[displayProperty]}, but it fails when displayProperty contains a dot.

One solution would be ('obj.' + displayProperty)?eval, although it involves generic expression parsing and so is not the fastest. The fastest running solution would be to create a custom method (TemplateMethodModelEx implementation) that you could use like ${walkProperty(obj, displayProperty)}, which would split the string at the dots, and call TempalteHashModel.get in a loop.

Related

Can Orbeon controls have multiple values?

I think the answer is no, but the question has been put to me so I'd like to confirm. My understanding is that any custom XBL control that I create for use in Form Builder can have one and only one value. Is this correct?
I have always assumed this because the control name is then used in the data instance as the name of the node which contains the the value.
This question comes from the desire to have reusable components with multiple values, for example, an Address control so that addresses can be recorded consistently and the same set of fields does not need to be added many times. Orbeon does have some support for this in the form of Section Templates but because the control names stay the same in each instance of a Section Template this does not work well with our design.
The best idea I've had is that a custom control which records multiple values could encode all the values into a single text string for example in JSON. Of course, this is not ideal.
Are there any other options?
It is possible for controls to have multiple values. When that happens the values are typically stored in nested elements. I.e. a control could bound to an element <address>, and could create nested elements <street>, <city>,<country>, etc to store the different parts of the address.
In practice, you can look at how this is done in the Image Annotation annotation control (see wpaint.xbl), which creates nested elements <image> and <annotation>, leveraging the xxbl:mirror="true" functionality.

Does #Html.Editfor use data bind

I want to know if #Html.Editfor use databind. In http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.web.mvc.html.editorextensions.editorfor(v=vs.118).aspx
They say that it use a for each method, but one of my colleague makes me doubt by saying that this is databind.
They have mentioned on their page
Returns an HTML input element for each property in the object that is
represented by the .....
Here they are saying that #Html.EditFor is available for each property of the model. Its not same as its using foreach. This is indeed data binding.

Can't understand, what does method getSingularObjectFromString do?

I'm developing own custom field type in JIRA.
My class is very simple, it extends GenericTextCFType.
My goal is to store some identifier (ID) of field value in database but to show human-readable caption of the field value on Issue form.
I searched methods of GenericTextCFType class and found method getSingularObjectFromString, and I don't understand, what it does.
JIRA javadoc says: "Returns a Singular Object, given the string value as passed by the presentation tier"
But what is the Singular Object and what is it needed for?
Yes, it's not a great name. I wrote about it in detail in "Practical JIRA Plugins"
(O'Reilly). Here's an extract from there describing many of the methods in detail (sorry about the formatting). The book also has worked examples available at https://bitbucket.org/mdoar/practical-jira-plugins
CustomFieldType Methods
The example’s custom field type class will implement the CustomFieldType interface as usual, but instead will extend a class higher up in the inheritance hierarchy than NumberCFType. The class we will extend is AbstractCustomFieldType and it’s at the root of most classes that implement CustomFieldType.
The methods in the CustomFieldType interface with “SingularObject” in their name refer to the singular object, in this example a Carrier object. All other methods in JIRA 4 custom fields that refer to an Object are referring the transport object, e.g., a Collection of Carrier objects. JIRA 5 removed the use of Object in most custom field methods.
For more information about what changed in JIRA 5.0 with custom fields see https://developer.atlassian.com/display/JIRADEV/Java+API+Changes+in+JIRA+5.0#JavaAPIChangesinJIRA5.0-CustomFieldTypes. There were some major changes in the class hierarchy, and most classes now have a Java generic as a parameter instead of just using an Object as before.
There are two objects that are typically injected into the constructor of a custom field type’s class. The first is a CustomFieldValuePersister persister object, which is what will actually interact with the database. The second is a GenericConfigManager object that is used for storing and retrieving default values for the custom field. Other objects are injected into the constructor as needed—for example, the DoubleConverter in Example 2-2.
The first set of methods to consider are the ones that the custom field type uses to interact with the database in some way.
getSingularObjectFromString()
This method converts a string taken from the database such as “42.0###The answer” into a Carrier object. A null value means that there is no such object defined.
Fields with Multiple Values
Collection<Carrier> getValueFromIssue(CustomField field, Issue issue)
This is the main method for extracting what a field contains for a given issue. It uses the persister to retrieve the values from the database for the issue, converts each value into a Carrier object and then puts all the Carrier objects into a trans- port object Collection. A null value means that this field has no value stored for the given issue. This is one of the methods that used to return an Object before JIRA 5.0
createValue(CustomField field, Issue issue, Collection<Carrier> value)
updateValue(CustomField field, Issue issue, Collection<Carrier> value)
These methods create a new value or update an existing value for the field in the given issue. The persister that does this expects a Collection of Strings to store, so both of these methods call the method getDbValueFromCollection to help with that.
getDbValueFromCollection()
A private convenience method found in many custom field type classes, sometimes with a different name. It is used to convert a transport object (e.g., a Collection of Carrier objects) to a Collection of Strings for storing in the database.
setDefaultValue(FieldConfig fieldConfig, Collection<Carrier> value)
Convert a transport object (a Collection of Carrier objects) to its database repre- sentation and store it in the database in the genericconfiguration table.
Collection<Carrier> getDefaultValue(FieldConfig fieldConfig)
Retrieve a default value, if any, from the database and convert it to a transport object (a Collection of Carrier objects). The FieldConfig object is what represents the context of each default value in a custom field.
The next set of methods to consider are the ones that interact with a web page in some way. All values from web pages arrive at a custom field type object as part of a Custom FieldParams object, which is a holder for a Map of the values of the HTML input elements.
validateFromParams(CustomFieldParams params, ErrorCollection errors, FieldConfig config)
This is the first method that is called after a user has edited a custom field’s value. Any errors recorded here will be nicely displayed next to the field in the edit page.
getValueFromCustomFieldParams(CustomFieldParams customFieldParams)
This method is where a new value for a field that has been accepted by validate FromParams is cleaned and converted into a transport object. The custom FieldParams object will only contain strings for the HTML elements with a name attribute that is the custom field ID—e.g., customfield_10010. A null value means that there is no value for this field.
getStringValueFromCustomFieldParams(CustomFieldParams parameters)
This method returns an object that may be a String, a Collection of Strings or even a CustomFieldParams object. It’s used to populate the value variable used in Chapter 3: Advanced Custom Field Types Velocity templates. It’s also used in the Provider classes that are used by custom field searchers.
String getStringFromSingularObject(Carrier singularObject)
This method is not the direct opposite of getSingularObjectFromString as you might expect. Instead, it is used to convert a singular object (Carrier) to the string that is used in the web page, not to the database value. The returned String is also sometimes what is stored in the Lucene indexes for searching (“More Complex Searchers” on page 57). The singular object was passed into this method as an Object before JIRA 5.0.
The final set of CustomFieldType methods to consider are:
Set<Long> remove(CustomField field)
This method is called when a custom field is entirely removed from a JIRA instance, and returns the issue ids that were affected by the removal. The correct method to use for deleting a value from a field is updateValue.
String getChangelogValue(CustomField field, Object value)
String getChangelogString(CustomField field, Object value)
These methods are how the text that is seen in the History tab of an issue is gen- erated. When a custom field of this type changes, these methods are called with the before and after values of the field. The difference between the two methods is that the if the value later becomes invalid, the string will be shown instead (https://developer.atlassian.com/display/JIRADEV/Database+Schema#DatabaseSchema-ChangeHistory).
extractTransferObjectFromString()
extractStringFromTransferObject()
These methods are not from the CustomFieldType interface but they exist in the standard Multi fields for use during project imports.
Other Interfaces
There are a few other interfaces that are commonly implemented by custom field types.
ProjectImportableCustomField
The getProjectImporter method from this interface is used to implement how the custom field is populated during importing a project from an XML backup. If you don’t implement this interface then project imports will not import values for your custom field.
MultipleCustomFieldType
MultipleSettableCustomFieldType
These two interfaces are used by custom fields with options and that furthermore can have more than one option. For these classes, the values can be accessed using the Options class, which is a simple subclass of a Java List. These interfaces are not really intended for use by general-purpose multiple value custom field types.
Fields with Multiple Values | 41
SortableCustomField
This interface contains a compare method for comparing two singular objects. This is used by the Issue Navigator when you click on a column’s heading to sort a page of issues. This is actually a slower fallback for custom fields that don’t have a searcher associated with them (see Chapter 4).
RestAwareCustomFieldType
RestCustomFieldTypeOperations
These two interfaces are how the JIRA REST API knows which fields can be retrieved or updated. New in JIRA 5.0.

smartgwt beginner- how to display xml entered in text area into tree

I am working with Smart GWT 3.0 LGPL- I am trying to display in a tree the entire block of XML entered by user into a text area.
I can get the nodelist from the xml entered by user, however in Smart GWT, Tree widget accepts only TreeNode[] members as data.
How do I convert the NodeList (obtained using GWT's inbuilt XML parser) into TreeNode[]? Is my approach correct(to display the xml in tree form)? Or is the solution to solve this problem completely different from what I am thinking?
I assume you use the SmartGWT's TreeGrid object to create the tree. The TreeGrid is just a specialized ListGrid and, as the later, it can be databounded to a Datasource, which can easily parse an XML. Look at this example. It should help you to create a solution to your problem. You can just show only one field in your TreeGrid, if all you need is a simple tree.
In the case that you can't access the xml data through a URL, like accessing them through your text area, after you have parsed them as a NodeList, you should iterate them and create an array of TreeNode objects. For each Something object you should set its associated TreeNode object's attributes using the setAttribute(attributeName, attributeValue) methods. Then create a Tree object, and starting from the root you can add the TreeNode objects using the various methods of the Tree, at the required position. Then a simple: treeGrid.setData(Tree tree) will load and show your data in your TreeGrid.
You can create an array TreeNode[] which have size as nodelist's length, and in a cycle to put on a value. And after that you can set in a tree this TreeNode[].

The new ViewModel doesn't obsolete the ViewModel pattern in ASP.NET MVC 3, right?

In my understanding, the ViewModel pattern was designed to pass all the relevant data to View because 1) the view shouldn't perform any data retrieval or application logic and 2) it enables type-safety, compile-time checking, and editor intellisense within view templates.
Since dynamic expressions are defined at runtime, does this mean we don't get any of the 2)'s goodies?
You do not lose any of the existing functionality. You can still have a strongly-typed view such that when you access the Model property it will be of your specified type. The only thing that is added is a shorter way of accessing items in the ViewData dictionary.
Instead of the following
ViewData["MyData"]
you can have
View.MyData
Notice that you do not lose any type-safety because you never really had any. In the former case the key is a string (no certainty that it exists in the dictionary) and the value is an object so unless you cast it you can't do that much with it. In the latter you also get no intellisense and the returned value must be cast to something useful.
In fact the implementation of View.MyData simply takes the property name ("MyData") and returns the value coming from the ViewData dictionary.
Arguably the one thing you lose is the ability to have spaces or other characters that are not legal C# identifiers in your key names.

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