Bug 122568

Description Scott Delap 2006-01-03 17:24:59 EST

I'm currently attempting to build some reusable logic that builds nested trees of IUpdatableValues to easily bind to leaves deep in a tree of objects (patch on that later).  So you wind up with String property descriptions like of "foo.bar.name" that binds to the getName() method of an object returned by getBar() on a parent object returned by getFoo() on a root object. The issue with this is that the anonymous IUpdatableFactory in the DataBindingContext.registerFactories() method expects a type to be specified.  I would argue that in most cases the objects being bound to don't exist until after bind time.  This is especially true if your root object is really an IUpdatableValue serving as a selection holder.  In such a case you could be binding to a whole tree of "thin air" until the selection is populated.  I'm guessing the argument for specific types is that validators and converters need to be looked up.  I would counter that these could be lazily retrieved when actual object instances exist to convert.  

Further, I think there are times the very values you are attempting to bind to might be polymorphic in nature.  In this case the converters would have to be looked up dynamically anyway.  For example ... say you have a collection of objects mapped to a table.  Each object has a getType() method that returns type  Object.  The concrete class being returned may vary.  You would need a converter to create a value to represent this object in a cell of the table.  In this case the type itself is polymorphic and a converter can't simply be retrieved once.