Hi:
We tought that in some cases we need this datatypes. Currently, they are not implemented in Woody.
Can we do that?
I guess you need this for binding forms to application data?
So yes we can, but... I've been wondering for some time how to make Woody datatypes more tolerant regarding the target binding datatype. Defining all these new classes and the associated converters first makes the configuration bigger and second requires the form writer to know the exact range of the numbers it bind to.
If woody datatypes were more tolerant, we could simply have a "long" and "double" datatypes for numbers, and have them able to accept int, byte, short and float values. These can be considered as secondary value types whose values are accepted by a datatype along with its native value type.
Similiarily, we can say that the "date" datatype can accept a secondary "long" value type which will avoid defining a "longdate" datatype in the near future...
For this, I was envisioning two new methods on Datatype:
- Object normalizeValue(Object): accepts various secondary value types as parameter and normalize them to the real type. E.g. an Integer will be converted into a Long.
- Object getValueAs(Object value, Class clazz): converts a value to one of the possible secondary value classes allowed for this datatype.
Note that this doesn't collide with Convertors since these methods act on Object values and not on Strings.
What do you think?
Sylvain
-- Sylvain Wallez Anyware Technologies http://www.apache.org/~sylvain http://www.anyware-tech.com { XML, Java, Cocoon, OpenSource }*{ Training, Consulting, Projects } Orixo, the opensource XML business alliance - http://www.orixo.com
