Description Konstantin Komissarchik 2010-10-29 13:44:04 EDT

We currently have a workaround for this issue in Aspen, but logging the issue
so it won't be lost.

Email from Nadeem to Konstantin:
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  I'm noticing that the validate() method only appears to be called on
ModelElementLists (and subsequenly the list's elements) that are rendered in
a table on the UI, but not on the lists that are rendered in the tree via
<node-list>.  I'm trying to figure out if this is something wrong in my code,
or if this is the intended behavior?

  I'm trying to get errors to appear on tree nodes that represent erroneous
customizations in the webservices editor, i.e., a node whose existance is
invalid but none of the node's properties are invalid.  I tried an override
of the validators() method to handle the validation, but the method was never
called.  I also tried adding a validator to the list property using the
Validator annotation, but the validator was was never called.  I thought of
trying to add the @Validator annotation to the IModelElement, but it doesn't
seem like the annotation is valid in that context.

Email response from Konstantin:
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Currently, decorators on nodes in the content outline are limited to
surfacing aggregate validation state of content displayed in sections
attached to the node or to node's children. This is implemented in this way
to account for the fact that you can have multiple nodes covering the same
model element (to break up large model elements) and there might be
properties that you are not showing at all.

In the narrower case of list properties rendered in the content outline, I
think we can safely extend node decorators to take into account validation of
the list property as long as validation was shallow (the list itself, rather
than element properties). I don't think there would be ambiguity as to which
node should show the decoration and I don't think there is ever a case when
you don't want to see it.

Of course, once we add this, it becomes pretty important for us to have
tooltips that show the validation message. Right now, it is only a
nice-to-have item, since the user can drill down and find the original marker
to get more information from.